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Have you ever noticed yourself dreaming of the worlds far away and thinking that place is much more interesting? Have you ever noticed that when we say “travel” it always means going far away and exploring the totally unknown? But most of us do not know what is their Motherland about. To make it clear – there is nothing bad about being curious about the faraway lands, but it’s a shame not to know your own.
In his poem “To my fellow-countrymen, in Ukraine and not in Ukraine living, dead and as yet unborn my friendly epistle”
famous Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko wrote these lines:
“Study, read and learn
Thoroughly the foreign things —
But do not shun your own”
“
The idea appeared pretty much expectedly. The year before our trip through my Motherland Ukraine we travelled through France and the north-western part of Spain. We had a car and a tent. Though I know it’s nothing special for European people to make this kind of trip – for me, it was something pretty new. My family makes car camping for years, with the only difference – we go to the ukrainian Black Sea and stay at the same place for weeks.
Driving through the Provence fields, my boyfriend gave a comment which fascinated me: “These all fields! Look how much space around!”. You would ask me: “What is fascinating about that?”. Well, the things I had in my head. Watching these landscapes I felt I’m home. I didn’t find the things I saw fascinating, I found them normal, it was something I saw since I was a kid while my family travelled by car through the whole Ukraine to reach the village my parents were born at and to visit my grandparents. I only thought: if this nature of France fascinates people around the world, if those landscapes are the trend, if even Ukrainian people see it as a dream to see what I saw there, – why don’t they see it at home?
That trip brought me to the idea that I need to show my country to people from abroad and to see it from their perspective myself.
So what was the plan? Being nerdy, I always like to plan my trips. The idea was to reach the Carpathians… from the Black Sea. To be more exact: Kherson – Myhove. We planned two weeks for that, including the fact we stayed about 5 days in the hotel in the Carpathians.
On this trip, we didn’t have a tent, but my family car which is big enough to lay the mattresses in and sleep inside. Spoiler: we mostly slept in the hotel. Why? The first thing: safety. Ukraine doesn’t have organized camping places all over the country. And sleeping just somewhere in the wild is dangerous,- mostly not because of the wild animals, but because of the people. The second: no conditioner in the car, what makes you deadly tired till the end of the day,- so the only way to relax before the next day, where you drive again about 5-7 hours, was to sleep in a hotel room.
So the preparations were like that: finding the most interesting locations on the way to the mountains and… just go!
So the preparations were like that: finding the most interesting locations on the way to the mountains and... just go!
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