What a busy week it has been!   I thought the week would drag on in anticipation of leaving but it definitely has not.

We’ve spent our evenings shopping and packing.   We finally got everything to pretty much fit in the bags last night after having to unpack everything from Wednesday night, pull out some clothes, and re-pack all over again.   If you’ve never tried those clothes space bag things, I highly recommend them!   Our friend Linda loaned us some for the trip and we had serious doubts about whether they would really make a difference or not but we are believers now.   They’re like a giant ziplock bag that you put your clothes in, then seal it up, and start rolling the bag from the zipper down.   The air just squeezes right out the bottom so when you straighten it back out, you end up with an almost flat bag of clothes...   Rob says it reminds him of beef jerky.

The other thing that happened this week is that our I-171H extension finally showed up on Tuesday!   I was so excited to see this piece of paper before we left.   They had told us that after our first trip that they couldn’t request a court date until we had this form.   Talk about getting here just in the nick of time!   Whew... glad that worry is gone now!

I took the day off from work today to finish up everything and to wait on the FedEx & DHL deliveries.   We have some of our apostilled paperwork arriving today to take over with us and we’re still waiting on our passports & visas to get here.   Normally the passports would not be arriving at the last minute like this but the Thanksgiving holidays threw the delivery dates off a few days.   If you haven’t already discovered this for yourself, avoid DHL.   Our passports & visas ended up on the wrong plane this morning and now they’re not going to be able to get them to us until tomorrow morning.   They promise to have them at the airport waiting for us when we check in for our flight.   So much for getting a good night’s sleep!

I guess this is it for now.   The next blog entry will be from Moscow - provided the passports show up.   Wish us luck as we head off on this incredible journey!