Sunday sand play

Everyday I walk in a park carrying name of Ukraine’s largest hero – Taras Shevchenko. So I wanted to check a place where he wished to be buried - Kaniv.
The place is about 130 km from Kiev on Dniepro river.
Kees and Catharine agreed to go . Although they had no high expectations. We took doggies.
I got usual UA road pics – fields, tractors, vegetable stalls, vintage bikes and cars, police etc. About 30 km from Kaniv we drove along the lake. Fantastic scenery: water, birds, sandy beach... Photos of the place are below:

Kees suggested we check the place. We drove along a sandy road. We drove a bit too far in the sand. The car stuck.
We started to play in the sand. We had no tools so we improvised with plastic bottles. It's a picnick place so there were some bricks for shashlik grill. We put those below tires. But it did not help. We had to remove sand under the car.
When we got tired of shoving sand by hands, we walked back to the road in hope to get some help. But that local road was not extermly busy – plus we were picky as we needed another
4W to get our 4W car out. One truck stopped but when we explained the driver a problem – he smiled and drove away. We got back to "the sand box" to play. When we almost removed all the sand below the engine we heard another car coming near to us. Two Kiev families with a nice black labrador also thought the spot deservs some close inspection. But they parked their car at a distance from us. They approached us. Saw us stuck and shoving sand. Two men give car a strong push and we were out. Igor did not like the black lab so he started to chase him. Unfortunately lab ended in a dirty green water. We had so much fun moving sand with our hands there was no time for taking photos of our sand play. But we left a big hole behind us. Altogether we we stuck about hour and half.
The moment we were out of the sand box, sand started to irritate us.

About half an hour later we were in Kaniv and in a place where Shevchenko was buried. The moment we got out of the car Igor and Vibe found themselves in an argument with local stray dogs. Than at the entrance to the Shevchenko park we saw a sign “dogs not allowed”. Given stray dogs around we decided to ignore the sign. Once in a park we saw numerous stairs leading somewhere up. As we just finished a nice exercise of shoving sand, none of us was interested to climb stairs. We decided to drive along the Dniepro. At one spot we saw two nudists – one with a black towel around his head, another with a hat. We decided to turn back to Kiev.
On a way to Kiev we supported local population – we bought organic vegetables at the road stalls for the entire next week.
All in all – exciting Sunday. See pics at: http://picasaweb.google.com/gordie26/SundaySandPlay?authkey=Gv1sRgCMfAk6v-4Kb0cw&feat=directlink

If interested in Shevchenko here is wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Shevchenko