We got up early and I dragged all my bags downtown to meet them at the rental car place. Natasha made a last minute recruitment of a Danish girl named Ann, so we were splitting all our costs 4 ways now. Not that they were expensive to begin with - the guest house we've booked is nice and only about $30 total for the four of us, and the rental car is similarly cheap. We contended with horrible Georgian drivers (some of the worst I've ever seen - while Roman drivers were terrible, at least it felt justified because Rome is such a mess. Georgian drivers are incredibly aggressive and reckless for no reason at all) and eventually made it to a small city outside town with a famous church. It was nice and climbing the walls was fun, but it was rather similar to the main church in Tbilisi from yesterday. I got more Khachapuri for a late breakfast and then we headed on.

At some point, we got word that they'd reopened the road that was closed last night, so hopefully we'd be able to reach Stepantsminda. We stopped at another church built into a fortress overlooking a reservoir in the mountains. Very beautiful, though there was a weird guy with a macaw and a monkey sitting on him, hawking pictures, that Natasha strongly objected to. The ruins of the walls here were clearly the best part and the view over the lake was amazing. We drove for a while longer without any major stops, though there was a very strange area that was backed up literally miles with semi trucks. They had no snow underneath them so it was clear they'd been there multiple days, and they took up almost the entire right lane. We had to drive in the oncoming lane and there were a few sketchy moments where we'd round a corner without knowing if a car might be coming. After that, we started to ascend. There were many tight switchbacks and the mountain became solid white. It was incredibly beautiful. We tried to take a ski lift up the mountain, but apparently it's not open for the season so we left empty handed from the big ski resort town of Gudauri. Our next stop was at the monument to Georgian and Russian Friendship, a rather sad monument in hindsight since Russia invaded only a few years after it was erected. Up here it was properly cold - around zero F - and I was the only one of us who'd ever experienced such temperatures before. With the wind still and the sun shining, it wasn't too bad even without gloves. I broke out the stove and made some coffee at the top with Ann, since Natasha and Alexis retreated to the car quickly. I actually froze part of my fingers solid for a couple moments by touching the gas cannister of the stove. Because of how gas canisters decompress, they cool off sort of like how a refrigerator or A/C unit works. Even in warm weather they'll start to frost over, but in sub-zero temps it got so cold as to totally freeze my skin after only a couple seconds of contact. I dipped my fingers in the water and eventually all the feeling came back, but now that the sun was behind a mountain my tolerance for the extreme cold had gone with it.

We left the monument and tried to continue down the road, but discovered that it was blocked by police for traffic going north. Apparently this is a standard way of dealing with constricted roadways and wouldn't be uncommon in America either, but here it can last hours as opposed to the max 5 or so minutes in America. We waited for almost two hours as tons of freight-bearing semi trucks came over from Russia. Eventually we got through, though it was now long after dark. We had no issues getting to our guesthouse and we had some pretty good traditional Georgian food for dinner.

We're really close to the Russian border and I'd love to be able to cross over, but I don't think that's in the cards. It got down to -13 F (-23 with wind-chill) at one point, which is easily one of the coldest temperatures I've ever experienced. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to actually have snowed very much and the roads aren't too bad. Tomorrow we're going to visit a church in the mountains here and then try to find things on the way back to Tbilisi. I'm looking to take a bus to Yerevan tomorrow night so that I have a full day in Armenia, but I haven't figured out exactly how to do that yet. I think something will work out.