Tickets have been purchased

Well, it turns out Jeffrey and I will be celebrating a Christmas in WI and a Christmas in Ethiopia as the Ethiopian Christmas is celebrated Jan 7th. Our tickets are booked and we leave Chicago early on Jan. 3rd. We will have our Embassy date on the 6th and leave Addis Ababa on the 9th. On our return flight I believe we will be spending one day in NY. I think plane time on the way home will be somewhere around the 25 total hours. That should be a learning experience for us! I think the hardest part is going to be the time difference. They are 9 hours ahead of us, so our sleep patterns are going to be somewhat scattered for a while. We have a lot to do as far as getting all the paperwork we need to take gathered and adjusting the finances for the trip, exchanging money. We did find out that there is a Hilton in Addis Ababa and we were able to use our Hilton points to stay for free for 2 nights. The rest of the nights we will be at the guest house by the orphanage. We were also able to use our frequent flyers for our tickets to and from NY. So that was a big help! Looks like everything is falling into place.