Scouting My Route for Next Week

Friday, Sept. 12, 2014--Kiev

Today has been a planning day to a great extent.  First, before leaving the apartment this morning, I started searching for places to stay in Yerevan.  I hadn't done that yet, because I was waiting to make sure my flight to Georgia was okay and I was thinking about what I should do on my last night in Yerevan.  My first flight back to the U.S. begins at 4:10 in the morning.  Many flights from that area between Asia and Europe have flights coming and going at night.)  I will need to be at the airport around 2:00 to go through check-in and immigration procedures.  This morning I finally made the decision that it would be ridiculous to try to go to bed and then get up at 1:00 to get dressed and catch a taxi to the airport.  I'm not going to rent an apartment for that last night.  Instead, I will go to the airport in the late afternoon and try to sleep in the airport until time for check-in.  That will make getting to the airport easier and cheaper, since I can take a bus instead of a taxi.  And it will likely result in my getting more rest than if I rented a place for that night.  Therefore, I started searching for apartments for only 4 nights in Yerevan--checking in on Sept. 21 with departure on the 25th.  I have narrowed it down to 4 choices and will go back through them tonight to try to start the process of reserving one.

My next planning process involved going to the train station to determine the travel time I will need next Friday morning to get there and to take the bus from there to the airport here for my 9:45 flight to Batumi.  I always like to check out the route and connections so that everything will go smoothly--especially in a case with a flight that is non-refundable. 

I walked to the airport just because I wanted to see everything along the route.  It's a nice area most of the way, and it is downhill.  However, it took about and hour which is too long for me to walk it the morning of my departure.  Therefore, the first thing I did when I got to the station was to find the Metro exit where I will come out next week.  Then I went through the station to the other side to find the Sky Bus stop--the bus that leaves every 15-20 minutes to the airport.  Then I discovered an even faster underground route from the metro to the Sky Bus stop. 

The train station itself is quite beautiful.  I noticed it was nice as I walked through it with Sergey, my host at the apartment who picked me up when I arrived.  But we were talking and I didn't have time to look carefully.  So before doing my next scouting for my trip next week, I went back into the terminal and took photos.  It has tall ceilings, a giant staircase, nice mosaics of scenes from the city, a huge chandelier, and nice marble work.  

Next, I took the metro from the train station to my nearest station on that line to judge how much time it would take me to get to the station for that segment.  It's interesting that I could find nothing on the Internet before I came here that would indicate how fast it is to get to the center of town from the train station.  Every time I used a web source to route it, it would indicate an out-of-the-way bus route with transfers that would take a little over an hour.  It really only took about 8 minutes on the metro plus about 4-5 minutes on each end to take the long escalators to go down and up from there. 

Once I figured that out, I stayed down in the metro and took it back and forth to several of the stations.  Kiev is known for having beautiful stations on its Red Line (the original line) due to having been one of the major cities within the U.S.S.R.  The stations are nice, but the comparisons I have read of them to the Moscow metro stations are not accurate if the photos I have seen of Moscow stations are truly representative of the system there.

As I finally came out of my nearby station, I noted how far it is from my apartment for the final segment.  So next Friday, I can now estimate it will take me...

10 minutes to get from my apartment to the entrance to the metro
20 minutes to get from the metro entrance to the metro exit at the train station
5 minutes to get from the metro exit at the train station to the Sky Bus stop

...meaning I will need to leave the apartment about 6:15 next Friday to catch the 6:55 bus to the airport which will arrive at 7:40.  And that will give me the leeway to also catch the 7:10 bus which will arrive at the airport at 7:55.  (The airline told me to be at the check-in counter by 8:00.)

Why did I plan all of that today?  The owner of the apartment and his wife are coming on Sunday morning at 10:00.  They need to pick up the money for the extra days I am staying here, and she probably wants to water the plants and maybe change the bedding.  I will need to communicate to them about the time I have to leave the apartment on my departure date so we can determine what I should do with the key--whether he will be here at 6:15 or if there is an alternative of my leaving the key somewhere for them to pick up.