Driving down M5, we arrived at Tambov, where we planned to visit the VW garage for an oil change and to meet Igor and Andrei who helped us in 2018. I remembered Tambov as a quiet sleepy town in 2018 which was easy to find our way around. Six years later it is a somewhat larger busting town with a lot of traffic. We got hopelessly lost, even finding ourselves on an earthen road leading out to the fields not once but twice. There is a distinct lack of road signs and when I asked people for directions to Volgograd, nobody seemed to understand what I was talking about. Eventually I saw a sign saying Volgograd out of the corner of my eye and we finished up back on the M5, where we slept at a service station next to a cafe where we had a nice meal.
