Travel, Travel !

Hi Everyone,

I have been terrible at updating the blog lately! We have just been so busy with the end of the school year and preparing to travel.

So I will try to get everyone caught up.

We found out the night of BHS graduation (June 3rd) that we have a tentative travel date of June 16th (next Wednesday). So starting on Friday, June 4th we began trying to arrange flights and travel plans. Little did we know that the World Cup (soccer) is in South Africa during our travel time. Thus, we have had a really hard time getting flights. I called and emailed travel agents on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Scott, my sister (Angela), and I will be traveling to Ethiopia, thus we needed three tickets to Ethiopia. I worked with two travel agents and at first it really didn’t look good. The one travel agent couldn’t get us to Ethiopia until a day later than when we were supposed to arrive and the other travel agent got one confirmed ticket but the other two tickets were “standby.” It was a rough couple of days – but finally after two hours on the phone with our travel agents, we were able to get three confirmed tickets to Ethiopia by 6:00pm on Tuesday night.

We (hopefully) leave Minneapolis on Wednesday, June 16th at 10:30am and travel to Washington DC from Washington DC (leaving at 8:30pm) we will travel to Rome, Italy (just to refuel the plane and bring on new food) and finally we will arrive in Ethiopia at 7:00pm on June 17th.

We should get final confirmation tomorrow from our agency whether or not we are actually going to travel next Wednesday. Our agency feels very optimistic that we will but – since they only get a few days notice if all of our paperwork is ready at the US embassy in Ethiopia – they can only give us final notice when they hear something.

However, our travel agent, Scott, - ironic right – said that 100% of the cases that he has worked with since Feb. have left on their original “tentative” travel date.

So we are packing and trying to pick up a few words of Amharic (main dialect of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city) and Wolayta (Teferi’s tribal language).

If you want to practice with us here you go:
Amharic Wolayta
Mother en-nat aay
Father ab-bat aayawe
Sister e-het ?
to love maf-keur dos
dog wusha kana

We also spent some time trying to make hotel reservation for Tuesday night in Minneapolis – since we fly out early on Wednesday morning. However, apparently there is a nurse strike and all of the hotels in Bloomington and FULL. With the help on my sister and my sister-in-law we finally got a hotel in Eagan.

Now we just need to get final confirmation of travel, complete and check all paperwork, and finish packing and getting “B” ready for a wonderful week and a half at grandma’s house.

I will try to post a few more updates before we leave and we are really going to try to post to our blog while we are in Ethiopia.

We will keep in touch!

S, K and B