Ukraine: Thursday July 10th and Friday July 11th

So this is long overdue, but I will try to stay on top of blogging at least one day each day.

On July 10th, 10 ladies and I boarded a plane in Fresno to make our trek to Ukraine. What a LONG day it would be too! We boarded around 11 in the AM Thursday. Our first stop was Denver, then Munich Germany, then Budapest. The longest duration on the plane was about 10 hours from Denver to Munich. It really wasn't too bad. There were several movies and videos to choose from while on the flight. I got some sleep, and felt well once we landed in Budapest.

Once we landed in Budapest, we loaded all our luggage into 2 vans and drove 6 hours to Uzhgorod, Ukraine. It happened to be really HOT on Friday and the vans did not have any air conditioning. YIKES! Jan, Andrea and I were in the van with most of the luggage. Our drivers were missionaries from Germany, and didn't speak any English. We had to drive through the entire town of Budapest on surface streets to get to the freeway. We were burning up because there was no airflow in the van. It didn't help that we were trying to drive through Budapest at 4:30 on Friday afternoon either. Yes, they have just as bad of a traffic problem as we do! Once we hit the freeway, all was well.

The freeways were beautiful, actually. Very green landscape. Well kept roads. Public restrooms very frequently (much like our Rest Stops, but SOOOO much cleaner). The thing that was really beautiful were all the fields of sunflowers in full bloom!

We had to cross a border check in both Hungary and Ukraine, about 2 miles apart. Neither border gave us any troubles. Once we arrived in Uzhgorod, we met Alex and Patrice at Cornerstone English School. This would be our meeting point and headquarters for the week. The 10 ladies divided into 3 groups and we finally dispersed to our homes for the week.

I roomed with Debbie Linman and Cheryl Kent. We ended up with a fantastic family, who you will learn a lot more about later. We didn't arrive to the house until 12:30 AM, and we were all EXHAUSTED! We pretty much went straight to bed.