Steps to departure

So things are finally happening…Shawn got his travel orders this week. For those of you outside the Foreign Service community, travel orders are the bureaucratic ticket to everything. You must have your travel orders to get your plane tickets, ship your stuff, and do pretty much anything else required to get ourselves from here to Kyiv. After weeks of begging and bribing people to get these orders, we finally have them and are on track to actually leave the US.

Unfortunately, not every detail of our departure is a pleasant one. This week we had to give away two of our beloved pets. Gaz and Gigi really wanted to come along for the adventure, but for some reason you aren’t allowed to take rats on airplanes in this country. And even if we put them in a box and poked a couple of holes in the top and tossed it in the mail, Ukraine frowns upon the import of rodents. I don’t think even diplomatic immunity could get us past that one.

So we were lucky to find a really nice woman online who already had a few rats of her own and was happy to take our girls. She has rescued rats from breeders in the past and is currently fostering a dog. It was reassuring to us that she shares our love and concern for animals. And she’s going to keep us updated on how Gaz and Gigi are doing.

On a more upbeat note, Shawn’s birthday was last week and we spent a beautiful day at Mount Vernon. I didn’t realize exactly how close it is to Washington. Hopefully we’ll have a chance in the future to go during the spring or summer when all the trees and gardens are in bloom, but we had a great warm day to walk around the grounds. And we learned a little history while we were at it.