WELCOME TO MY TRAVEL BLOG

I have always enjoyed traveling, even if it meant sleeping in a tent when I was younger. I prefer hotels and cruise cabins now, but the motivation is the same...an adventure waiting to happen. Sometimes you will find me traveling with my husband and/or family. Sometimes I will travel alone, and sometimes I will travel with friends. I hope you find it entertaining to keep up to date with me as I explore the world around me. Warning...I like to take pictures of food so don't read if you're hungry. More adventures await...see ya soon...Amy.

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Travel to Ukraine

Our day started bright and early 0n the 3rd with a trip to the airport. We were determined to get our boarding passes and make sure we had a seat on our flight to New York where we could catch our international flight. We were successful even though we were chastised again for having paper tickets. They refused to issue our boarding passes for any other portion of the trip, insisting that we would have to check in at the gate in JFK because we had paper tickets. I spent 2 hours on hold in the JFK airport with Expedia trying to figure out how we were going to get from Kiev to Lugansk because it was not a Delta airline and Expedia sold us the tickets. Expedia said Delta was responsible and Delta blamed Expedia which left us in the middle. Our flight from JKF to Kiev was uneventful although long at about 10 hours. We arrived in the morning of the 4th. Once we arrived in Kiev, we were met by Sasha, a beautiful dark skinned (thus her nickname "Dark Sasha"), precious young lady. She would serve as our interpreter because no one speaks English, only Russian. It turned out that we needed her help badly because we had to buy another plane ticket to Lugansk for each of us. The Lugansk airport was unable to even find us in their system despite the fact that we had paper tickets for the flight the day before that we had missed. They said Expedia was responsible and they could not reissue out tickets. We were surprised to find out that we have to pay for our ticket in Ukraine currency (hryvnia) and we had not brought much cash with us because we weren't scheduled to have an opportunity to spend much. A trip to the ATM and scrounging among us produced just enough for our two tickets. We had most of the afternoon to wait on the evening flight and decided to look around Kiev. We ate lunch at McDonalds which turned out to be a bad idea for Deanna. It wasn't long into our walk that we realized that we needed to go back and wait at the airport where we knew we could find decent restrooms. We would also be meeting with our North Monroe group to catch the flight to Lugansk as well as meeting their interpreter, Anton. Everyone arrived safe and sound and went through the boarding process without any problems. Our flight was delayed an hour but we had begun to roll with travel problems at this point. We were met at the Lugansk airport by Shane Duke and a BIG trailer. Traveling to the camp in the dark was interesting and we were met at the camp by a big bunch of staff. We were so exhausted we literally fell into our beds, but not before noticing that our beds were wooden platforms with a thin mattress. This was literally camp and we hoped we were ready for it because in the morning we would hit the ground running.

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