Cracks, Jets and Monuments

Whilst driving through Lithuania, we came across an airfield with a series of Ex-Soviet fighter jets as gate guards. Naturally, we had to take a closer look at some post World War 2 to Cold War aviation history.

The three jets included a MiG-21 (shown below); the worlds most produced supersonic fighter. It was originally produced in Russia in 1959 and is still in service with some air forces today.

Also included in the line-up was a MiG-25 (centre of the three planes above) and capable of speeds up to 3.2 times the speed of sound. A Sukhoi Su-15 also featured (below), a type made infamous when it was used to shoot down Korean Air Flight 007 in 1983, a passenger carrying Boeing 747.

As an update on our previous post we made it to Carglass in Lithuania, ok we didn’t really have a chip on our windscreen so much as a large crack growing at about 7cm per day… clearly we needed a new windscreen. We hadn’t been very hopeful that we’d be able to get a new screen, Suzuki’s don’t seem to be very common in Eastern Europe.

The guys at Carglass confirmed we needed a new windscreen and no they didn’t have one in stock. However one of their other branches had a Chinese import which they could get over within the hour. Nice. While we waited for the windscreen to be fitted, we were driven to the local market where Rory got a new hair cut! The car was ready to roll before we knew it and we were back on the road to Belarus. Thanks to Marius Hoppenas and the team at Carglass Lithuania we were really impressed with the speedy and courteous service we received.

Unfortunately speedy is not a word we could apply to the Lithuania-Belarus border crossing, to cut a long story short we started queuing at 6pm and finally cleared Belarus customs at 3am. The next day we headed into Minsk for some sightseeing. Next stop Ukraine border…