The journey begins with a few small steps... this is the cover page for my train ticket. It basically says that the train leaves from from Yaroslavsky Station at 21:35. on January 9th.

It also states that the ticket is valid for 4 month from the date of issue. What it means is that if I were to miss the train, I could get on a different train along the same route, using the original ticket - but I'd need to pay for a new reservation. Interesting, actually, since it's fairly uncommon to buy a direct (non-stop) ticket and have the ability to hop on and off trains. The difficult part (even in the dead of a Siberian winter) is that many of the trains will be full!!

The reservation page of the train ticket - saying that I'm taking train 004Z (0043A), am in carriage #9, am traveling in 1st class, and have berths 11 and 12. Some friends were considering going with me & we initially thought it might be five or six people going along - but it turns out I'm going by myself. I still bought two tickets - it's a long way and I thought it would be nice to have a little privacy. Granted, some folks say that the company you keep is part of the adventure, but I still decided to have my own compartment. Time will tell whether this was a good thing or bad thing. The ticket also says I'm going from Moscow (Moskva) to Beijing (Pekin).

Coupled with the last two parts, this is the actual train ticket - it reiterates much of what is on the reservation page an details some of the major cities along the way - Moscow, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan Ude, Ulan Bator, Erlian, and Beijing. Whew!

My Chinese visa. I use Travel Document Systems in Washington DC to facilitate ordering my visas - I could have done it on my own, but imho, it's much easier to use a service. http://www.traveldocs.com. I sent my passport to Travel Docs on 5 December, the Russian visa was issued on 6 December & the Chinese visa was issued on 15 December. I got them back in via UPS today (22 December). Two weeks two days, not bad at all. I have a friend who visited China a few years ago and she did the visa for China on her own and it took a couple of weeks. Figure the Chinese one took just a few working days using TDS. Very very pleased with TDS.

And my Russian visa. I was a little worried about how fast this one would be turned around, but TDS received my submission on 5 December and you can see that the Russian consulate issued it on 6 December. Wow!

I'm counting the days - this is gonna be fun.

This is a a high-level view of the route that I'll take on the Trans Siberian - actually, it's probably more correct to call it the Trans Mongolian. Today is 12/31 and I take off on 1/4. Can't wait.

It's been a pretty long day - this is the Aeroflot flight from Warsaw to Moscow - I almost missed it. The LOT flight from Chicago to Warsaw sat on the ground for an extra two hours last night in Chicago before finally taking off. We landed in Warsaw at 10:35 and this flight to Moscow was leaving at 11:20...

Thankfully, they were in the same terminal - although I *almost* got on a flight to Vilnius by mitake...! doh! Good thing I made some friends on the Chicago to Warsaw flight who happened to be going on to Moscow - they were like, "dude, you're in the wrong line...!"

Speaking of lines - we landed in Warsaw and were all going to connect to Moscow, but because we changed airlines (LOT from Chicago to Warsaw; Aeroflot from Warsaw to Moscow), LOT could not issue us boarding passes in Chicago for the Moscow leg - this all meant that we had to stand in a HUGE line to get our boarding passes upon arrival in Warsaw. It really ate up those 45 minutes.

Another shot of the Tu154 we flew to Moscow... I was pretty surprised (ok, I wasn't) how many things were falling off this plane...

that looks nice & clean & hygienic, right?