The first Post, Wednesday July 25, 5 weeks to go!

Melanie has decided that we should have a "Blog" while we are in South Africa so that we can stay in touch. I guess I'm going to have to take my laptop after all! Melanie was so keen, she even started a blog for us so I guess I had better start finding out how it all works. As she came up with the caption "Still crazy after 40 years", a family photo taken at our 40th wedding anniversary "bash" would seem to be appropriate.

While we have only 5 weeks left before we fly to Johannesburg, SA, we have plenty of things on the calender to keep us occupied in the meantime. I fly to Harrisburg on Sunday evening and will commence my last two weeks at Highmark in Camp Hill until I return after Thanksgiving -- assuming they still want me to return after we get back from SA, which currently they do. I fly home from Camp Hill on August 9 and on the 10th we're driving to Hot Springs, a little town beside the Appalachian Trail in the North Carolina mountains, where we're attending the destination wedding of David Burke and Rachel Malone on the 11th (the groom is the guy I hiked on the AT with for 6 days in late April last year, and who finished the Trail in Maine in September). http://www.mountainmagnoliainn.com/ After the wedding we're spending 3 nights at a cabin in the mountains with the "newly weds" so we can do some hiking together,or just hang out, watch the birds, etc. http://www.ncvalley.com/-brokenarrow I can assure you all that David and Rachel invited us to join them, we didn't just invite ourselves! On Aug. 15 we plan to drive from North Carolina to Falls Church to spend a few more days with Melanie and David and baby Indigo, probably returning to MB on the 18th. Then we'll have just 10 days at home until we leave for SA on August 29.

We can't end this first post without including a photo showing us with Indigo, our darling little granddaughter whom Melanie and David went all the way to China to adopt for us. Here we are with her at the farm where Melanie keeps her horse, Dan. To any of you who are reading this blog who haven't followed Melanie and David's "Journey to our Daughter" blog, please go to http://www.brookesweiss.com/ and you can read everything from April this year through May 1, when they got their "referral", through June 20 when they left for China, through July 1 when they received Indigo, through July 13 when they returned with her to the US, and up to the present. (You'll need a whole evening to read everything and look at all the pictures, but we highly recommend it, and cannot commend M&D enough for all their hard work in regularly posting such informative blogs that all of us who've been reading them feel that we were on the "journey" with them. We love you so much M&D!

We'll do another practice post soon, and give a few details of our South Africa travel plans.