The World Travelers Finally Arrive Safely. . . and Then Crash and Burn!!!. . .

First there was the 9 1/2-hour red-eye trip to Amsterdam in which none of us slept more than 3 hours, followed by a layover of 6 hours which consisted of a two-hour power nap in a comfy 'napping' area in the airport where Diva, Mike and Dominique slept while tireless Alex enjoyed his new Game Boy. Then onto another 7-hour red-eye flight from Amsterdam to Almaty, in which we slept only a couple of hours and arrived at 5 a.m.!!

Upon our arrival we met our lovely traveling companions, Helen and Sandy who are also adopting from Rudniy, and we acquainted ourselves for 7 1/2 hours in the airport cafe. We then met our coordinator, Baha, who brought fruit and pastries for all to enjoy. Alex and Dominique were great!!! Sleepless flights, long layovers, lengthy waits and still they have been our perfect little angels, with the help of some handy electronics of course. We then scrambled for seats on a very old, Soviet-era propeller plane for an extremely hot & humid (easily 100 degrees inside the plane!), 4-hour flight to Kostanai, our final destination. Upon our arrival there, Mike bravely took a picture of our old, beat-up airplane and promptly got cussed-out (twice) in Russian by our crazy bus driver whom we think must have been trying to protect decades-old KGB secrets! And strangely enough, we met a fellow American that used to work for Mike's company and who was on his way to adopt his 7th (!!) child from an even more remote location eight more hours away by train. And we thought our trip was tough!

An old van then took our tired corpses to our hotel, the "Tselinnaya" in the heart of Kostanai, where we were hoping to savor the glory of REM sleep. We all literally crashed and burned upon hitting our beds, but it was not meant to be blissful for long. The kids woke up at 2 a.m. and immediately began to play (still on California time!) until Diva intervened by sending Alex to sleep in the "snoring room" with Mike and then adeptly quieted Dominique down with a pile of books and a reading light which worked perfectly until around 6 a.m. After a quick ham & eggs breakfast with our traveling companions and coordinator it was finally time to go to the baby house in Rudniy!! But, sorry, this story is for the following posting. . .