This time tomorrow...

Where will be be? On a spaceship somewhere, sailing across an empty sea???
(-The Kinks)

I'll be on a plane. Yuck. Tomorrow at 6:15am, I leave for 3 1/2 months. Whew. Long time. First flight is from Midway airport to Dulles in Washington, D.C., where I meet up with everyone for the overnight group flight to Paris. We then have a 7 hour layover followed by another overnight flight to Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar - a 12 1/2 hour flight. I might die. Another 4 hour layover and finally, our flight to Fort Dauphin, which gets in at 11:30am, 2 days after I leave Chicago.

I'm infinitely more nervous than I was a week or so ago. I visited Beloit this weekend and said good-bye to everyone (except those that are already abroad in Kenya, Ecuador, Denmark, Galapagos, London, Argentina, Morocco...), my friends from Chicago are already off at school, my dad's in the Cape Verde islands off of Senegal about to sail across the Atlantic, and sister is in the Dominican Republic visiting her boyfriend. So now it's just me and my mom. And the cat, who thinks she's the queen of the house right now, and probably will even more so once I leave (my mom is the only person she likes). It's pretty weird.

We finally got the list of other students on the program - 16 total, from Colorado (x2), Minnesota, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, California (x2), New York, Canada, Georgia, Texas and Kentucky. Very excited to meet everyone! We'll all be taking classes and everything together for the majority of the program, up until the independent project during the last few weeks.

Well, I just heard a "Karen, shouldn't you be packing or reading??" from the other room, so I guess I should be going. I'll update when I can - internet access is going to be pretty sparse there, so no guarantees about how frequently you'll get to hear about all my ridiculous lemur-hugging antics. But if you sent me your snail mail address (or do so soon!) then you'll probably get a postcard.

Much love,
KB

Heavens, that's far!

Using http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/calculate-distance.html, I discovered that it's 9614.8 miles between Chicago and Fort Dauphin, Madagascar.

And 9675.8 miles between Beloit and Fort Dauphin.


I leave a week from yesterday. eek!

-KB