Epic Day

May 11^th

Today started out a little rushed because we thought we were supposed to leave for our Road of Life bus tour half an hour later than anticipated. After everyone gathered their belongings we piled into a bus and started our voyage down the road in which the 1941 siege took place. Along the way down we stopped at many monuments honoring the children fallen in the siege, the guerilla men, the pilots and even the 1.5 million supplies successfully brought across frozen Lake Lagoda. We got out and looked at all of these monuments as well as saw a few more mass graves like the ones we saw on our Victory Day tour. Halfway through our trip we stopped at a Russian café for lunch and had beef goulash, tea and borsht. The next stop after lunch was the best part of our day and according to most people the best part of the entire trip. We got to walk around in the trenches, which bordered the water line. This was the place where masses of Russian soldiers were killed because they were cornered against the army by the German army. At first I was personally a little skeptical of walking through the trenches because as our guide Sasha said, we were walking over a combination of metal and bones. But, everyone got really into scanning them for debris. In the middle of the field we found our first human bone. Heather said that it was a hip bone and we all got really intrigued so started to look for more- and were shockingly very successful. A few of our best finds while walking and digging through the trenches were the hip bone and a femur, which had bullets through them, a bullet case in tact and a few un-shot bullets that were coated with gold. Heather literally had to drag us out of the trenches so that we could make our last stop on the tour, which was a museum with a diorama intricately depicting the siege. I was okay though because we got to continue to play a little more outside the museum on the huge warfare tanks! The day wound up being quite relaxing for a change because we were on a bus instead of walking but it was also a lot of fun. I think that the best way to describe the Road of Life as a whole would be a combination of tragedy and triumph.

 

Diane