Transiberian Route - Suggestions

Hello. I will be visiting Russia this July. I'll be staying around 18 days, will be doing the trans-siberian journey and have made a very hurried itinerary and would love to get some input from you guys. Here is a basic sketch of my plans:

July 2-
Arrive in Moscow at around 2pm. Check into hostel and look around nearby. Staying here for 3 days
July 5-
Take the "Ural" train and go to Yekaterinburg.Stay on the train for 25hrs. Stay in the city for 2 Day
July 9-
Take the 4am train to Irkutsk. Stay on the train for 48hrs. Stay in the city for 3 days.
July 15-
Take a Midnight plane to Vladivostok and reach there early morning. Stay there for 2 days.
July 17-
Take a Noon flight back to Moscow. Stay the night and fly back on the next day.

My questions are:

-Is Yekaterinburg worth stopping , or should I stop in some other city ?
-Is spending 3 days good enough in Irkutsk and Vladivostok?

Any suggestion for this trip will be most welcome. Thank you so much guys !

His and Good luck with your plans

l try be nice but with 18 days in Russia your trip could be much much better if you just took Moscow
and saint--Petersburg or anything else near by Russia is Big country,
and Russians have different way to calculate the time

Now you choose the Trans-siberian

my suggestion are
stop 1 VLADIMIR 2 days or 3 nights you spend one day in SUSDAL old town with lot of churches
stop 2 KAZAN it calls West mets East with mosques near to churches and a white Kremlin you enjoy wander around
IRKUTSK only reason is to move your legs and get out of train

IF you wand to see BAIKAL LAKE you need around 5 whole days IRKUTSK a town nothing to offer, and is 80km away from the lake if you wand to see the lake an idea is take to Okhlen island you need 3 days 1 day to go, 1 day stay and have a tour and 1 day come back you may be able catch evening train to Vladivostok, or take to Livstyaka spent the rest of day come back next day 3 hours by bus catch evening train to Vladivostok
it will be hard work though NO HOLIDAYS TRAVEL !!!

Why you do that ???????
Good Luck

I did the transsib from moscow to vladivostok several years ago and loved it. Obviously you need to like spending a lot of time in the train :-). I also feel that your trip is quite rushed, but you know best what you like, how fast you like to travel etc.

The one "must" stop in my opinion is lake baikal, which is beautiful and warrants at least full 2 days (more would be better).

I would either travel nonstop to irkutsk to have enough time for lake baikal. Or cancel vladivistok, again to have more time on lake baikal. I didnt stop in yekaterinburg, so cant comment on it. I did enjoy vladivostok a lot, but i had more time (in general, 3 days there are eneough) and travelled there by train (and continued from there by train to harbin in china). Im not sure i would make the effort to fly there and back all across russia to moscow for a couple of days.

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