Tag: rosinante

Friends from Germany and I got my own snowboard (January 2024)

In January I had to do a border run to Armenia with Rosinante. Because of customs regulations.

It was actually super nice to spend some time in a mild climate and just hanging around outside. And it was super nice to experience Armenian hospitality again. After a couple of minutes at a nice spot at a river, some guys started a barbeque and invited me to join. We had a great time together.

After a night in Armenia, I went to Tbilisi, visited a nice bazaar with Whoopy and met Racki who went down from the mountain with a Minibus. Together we went to the airport to pick up a friend of her who came to visit us. We spent a nice time in Tbilisi sight seeing and in the evening we went for dinner and a cocktail bar.

In the cocktail bar we met friends who we had met in Gudauri. Our time in the bar was crazy. The waitress and bar keeper was absolutely drunk and maybe on some other drugs and we had weird but funny conversations. After some time a Russian girl joined us. She was drunk as well, very funny, had a rich husband and in the end she paid all our drinks.

And the friend of Racki brought my snowboard and equipment that I had bought in Germany via Kleinanzeigen. It was super awesome to finally have my own stuff. My snowboard was pure red and I called it Zäpfchen. The friend of Racki got late to the airport in Germany because of the public transport. He was so late that there was no time to check in the big bag with all my stuff properly and so the airline let him bring the big bag without paying.

After two days another friend of Racki joined us and together we had so much fun snowboarding, hanging around and spending time together.

Living on a mountain in Winter in Georgia (January 2024)

Our cars had been stuck in a parking lot for weeks when a massive excavator came and cleaned the masses of snow in the parking lot.

The massive machine had a lot to do with it and in the end I gifted the driver a bottle of wine.

Living in Gudauri at 2200m during winter was an interesting experience. Things change a lot with the cold. Of course Rosinante’s heater was running a lot. And I had to clean our cars from the snow because sometimes the layer of snow was nearly a meter thick after a night of snowfall.

Once while cleaning the cars, a tourist family from India came by and asked if they may clean parts of the snow because it looks interesting and they never had to do it in their life. I was happy to let them do so and they had a lot of fun.

We couldn’t open Rosinante’s roof because the heater was not able to maintain the warmth with the popped up roof and so our living space got much more limited and we had to deal with humidity and ice on the inside of some parts of our camper cabin. But we did very well and it was adventurous.

In the beginning we tried to use the heater as little as necessary, but next time I’d just keep it running all day and night and regulate the temperature by opening the windows more or less.

And the route leading to Gudauri was crazy. After Gudauri this road leads to the only real border between Georgia and Russia and so all the trucks have to take it.

Because of the changes in temperature, the trucks and everything else, the condition of the roads got worse. One of the sharp corners broke so much that trucks got stuck for hours blocking the whole road. Other times the mountain pass leading to the border or the border itself got closed and all the trucks got stuck in Gudauri on the road. No chance to turn back or go further.

Whoopy’s refused to turn on after some nights with about -18 degrees Celsius and so she had to wait until the temperatures had risen again. But then it started without any problems.

And from time to time we had the best pizza in all of Georgia!