Thursday, 07 January 2010 10:30
In sixteen hours, we leave for Slovakia, to renew our visas. We're leaving at 2 in the morning in order to get to Kiev--a 20-hour drive--the first day.The next day, we'll time our journey through the second half of Ukraine--another 20-hour drive--so we can get to the Ukraine/Poland border before the line forms. (The Ukrainian mafia posts itself at the border and "sells" places in the front of the line: if you don't pay, you don't move. Last year, we crossed the border in the middle of the night on Christmas, and though they tried to get money from us, Tim was able to refuse since there was no line, and they had no leverage.) It should take us 2 long days of driving to cross Ukraine. This is the scariest part of the trip, since the roads are terrible and the police are everywhere, waiting to extort money on the thinnest of manufactured excuses. We hope to go through Poland and arrive in Vrbovce, Slovakia on Monday the 11th.
Since Tim & I don't have the required number of blank pages left in our passports, our first step is to go to the American Embassy in Bratislava (the capital) and get more pages sewn into them. After that, we can drop our paperwork off at the Russian Consulate (also in Bratislava) and then we just have to wait 3 weeks for our new visas to be processed.
While we wait, we'll pop over to Budapest, Hungary on the 19th for a couple of days of medical work at the American clinic there. On the 21st, it's back to Slovakia. On February 3rd, we'll go to Czech Republic to spend Sarah's birthday in Prague. By the time we return to Vrbovce, our documents should be ready to pick up. We'll leave Slovakia on the 11th and hope to be home late at night or early in the morning on the 15th. Piece of cake!
We need your prayers the whole way there and back for safety on the roads and from the police. We'll update along the way, if we can find internet connections. Meanwhile, I'm noticing that the bags are not going to pack themselves: I guess that's the next thing on my list. Thanks for praying for us!
