Hey everybody, we’re doing great in Ethiopia. Text messaging isn’t working, Internet is sketchy, power was out all day. So sending any updates has been hard. Sorry.

But despite the bewilderment of international travel, we had an awesome day meeting Milo. He’s so tiny and adorable. We had several hours with him today, he mostly watches everybody with his big, big eyes.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

Today is our first full day in Ethiopia. We’ll have an orientation briefing, cover miscellaneous stuff, meet with case workers and other folks, and then the big moment:

We’ll get to meet Milo for the first time.

It will be a brief visit, but our first chance to see him in the flesh.

With the wonders of transatlantic flight and time changes (Ethiopia is about 9 hours ahead), we’ll end up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in the early evening (after a brief fuel-stop in Rome).

After making it through customs we’ll head to the guesthouse where we’ll be staying. Then I think we crash.

We’re leaving for the airport at 10:00 a.m. We’ll hopefully have a tear-free goodbye with Lexi (yeah, right) and then head to the airport for much waiting and metal-detection.

Lexi will be spending the ten days while we’re gone with her grandma, hopefully having a blast and being spoiled and not dwelling too much on the fact that we’re gone. We’re not sure how this is going to go, but we have lots of friends lined up to step in and help out if need be.

This afternoon we’ll fly to Washington, D.C., for about a three-hour layover, then depart for Ethiopia in the evening.

I’ve written blog posts like this for each day of our journey, explaining what the itinerary says we’ll be doing (Abby wrote up an overview of the whole trip). You can also follow along with what actually happen on Twitter, as I hope to post a handful of updates per day (assuming local technology cooperates). Depending on how much computer access we get, we may try a few blog posts from Ethiopia as well.

Thanks for following along!