Life is a whirlwind. 5/21/04

Whew. Our heads are spinning out of control. We had our travel meeting today. All is still a go. We got to talk to Diana, the owner of the agency. She was so sweet and so excited for us. She is Russian and spends about 6 months a year there. Her accent was very thick and at times it was hard to understand her but we made it through. Tonight when I get home we will sit down and book our hotel in Moscow. Our coordinator/translator in Stavropol will take care of our rooms in region and our translator in Moscow will take care of our plane tickets from Moscow to Stavropol and back. That's one less thing to worry about. Now the amount of cash we are going to be carrying. A HUGE WORRY. We have to pay our lawyer in cash, we won't go into the amount but it's quite a sum. Half on the first trip and the rest on the second trip when we go back to finalize the adoption. Wow that still doesn't seem real to say.

We booked our room tonight for the first night in Moscow and for the 2 nights at the end of the week when we return from region. We will be staying at the Radisson SAS. It looked quite posh online. :o) We had three choices and I know it's not the right way to look at it, but the Radisson was the cheapest. Our other options were the Mariott and the Mariott Grand. Go figure. Oh, yeah. Our plane tickets got here today. Was that fast or what???????? So now with our hotel booked, plane tickets in hand, we just had to wait for our visa's and start figuring out what to pack.

We were instructed to pack light and to pack an extra outfit in our carryon incase our luggage got lost. WHAT??!!?? So along with trying to pack our camera, and video camera and our paperwork that had to arrive with no wrinkles, we needed to pack an extra outfit apiece. Whew. This is going to be a challenge. I've already packed and unpacked our donation bag about a hundred times, making sure everything was just so so and that I hadn't forgotten anything.

Well, I'm mentally exhausted. More later. :o)