Our First Trip!

We finally received the news on May 9th and we were on our way to meet our daughter. Scott and I were filled with a sense of excitement and relief. Our day was finally here! Scott was so great about getting our Russian visas together and arranging for our flights. I had SO much to do with preparing my classroom for a week without me. My class was on the verge of taking their "BIG" standardized tests and I was going to miss two of them. This is difficult for a teacher because you work all year to get them to this point. I knew that my students were ready and I felt very good about leaving my 26 little ones behind. They have all studied so hard and now they will do their best.

We were given less than 2 weeks to prepare our visas, get plane tickets, and hotel reservations. Again, looking back, how did we accomplish this? Scott is wonderful at remaining calm and getting things accomplished. I thought I was calm, that is until I met Scott. He diligently called hotels and made arrangements for a safe journey to Krasnodar.

Besides getting my classroom ready, I was also in the middle of coaching a girls running team and we had a race to finish on May 17th. I remember running the race and running straight home to begin the packing. We had gifts to buy for all of the people we would come in contact with in Russia and we were almost finished packing.

We could hardly sleep the night of May 20th because the next morning we would be off on the trip of a lifetime. I don't think either of us slept much. We would leave from DC to London and then continue on to Moscow. After a 4 hour delay in Moscow, we would fly 3 more hours to Krasnodar. All of the hard work was finally coming to fruition...