After accompanying John Blashford Snell on a horseback expedition to Outer Mongolia, Barbara Whittome decided to cross-breed the tough Cossack working horses with her pedigree Arab horses back home in Suffolk. Rather than transporting them by truck, she "road-tested" three of them back from Volgograd - a journey which she recounts in this book, which is based on a diary which she kept daily on her computer. It is not only an account of the 2500-mile ride through Russia, Belarus, Poland and Western Europe, but also includes observations on bandits, vodka, horses, and contemporary Russian life and people.