Last night's stopover spot turned out to be perfectly peaceful and - given the circumstances - lent itself well to a settled night's kip. We never heard a muff from the campsite overnight: just like would almost certainly not have been the case had this scenario played out in England.
Of course, Emma ran again first thing this morning, but this time I counter-punched by doing an hour on the bike. I actually enjoyed the spin out, but it made me quite sure that engaging in a training-related tit-for-tat would be a war of attrition I could ever win. I think she's doping.
Post shower we made a move and headed north. It's been a mixed day of covering ground, interspersed with taking in a few bumbling diversion to see what we could see.
We've seen quite a lot. Amongst the more interesting bits-and-bobs have been dozens of extremely ornate and extravagant Orthodox churches, some really interesting and elaborate wooden buildings that are apparently part of a long distance trail known as the Carpathian Wooden Architecture Route, and countless immaculately maintained shrines.
Equally interesting - though slightly less conventionally so - have been numerous camouflaged and manned emplacements strategically placed on road and rail bridges, some heavy artillery being drawn by military trucks, and a couple of military road blocks that - thankfully - were operating in the opposite way to the way we were travelling. The traffic queues they caused were enormous: similar, in fact, to those caused by Chelsea tractors on a typical school run.
Other things of note we've witnessed have been the occasional shed-dwelling Roma community, many signs of a nationwide youth program known as Gen.Ukranian in action, and more of the solemn and beautifully crafted memorial walls to those killed in action in this latest round of ultimately-pointless nonsense.
One of the memorials was especially notable in as much as it was fully digitised. Soldiers lost appeared in a series of thumbnails along the bottom of a huge screen and then - in turn - a larger image of each individual would appear along with a few personal details. The ephemeral symbolism was poignant, but digitising such loss also seemed somehow to trivialise. I remain conflicted.
We had intended to make it to the Polish border tonight but the various bumbles, poor road conditions and a stop for fuel (£0.97/l) saw us behind schedule and rapidly tiring. It seemed sensible, then, to point the truck towards some undergrowth and call it a day. And here we are (coordinates). As per our other nights in Ukraine this is a very atypical stopover for us but we don't want to create any sense that we're attempting to squirrel away and up to no good.
Though right close to a road we're out of its sightline, there's hardly anything moving around, and the vista is good. There have been a few birds around and particularly notable was about 50 white storks restlessly following a distant plow and opportunistically picking off anything they deemed edible.
As a bonus, a slow worm came to have a look at what we were up to. Ukranian surveillance is undoubtedly sophisticated.
Post composed at 22:40 on Wednesday 13th August from our intended overnighting spot N 49.47688°, E 22.97626° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:49.47688%2C22.97626