Another Exploration Trip To Prague

Two weeks ago, we left our beautiful home state of Alaska for another Czech Republic ministry exploration trip. We've been to Prague before, but because we are contemplating a possible move to Czech Republic, we want to see what life is like outside the city of Prague. So on this trip, we are going to be visiting a number of places several hours from Prague. After getting all of our logistics in order, we packed our carry on luggage and our friend, Gerad Neely took us to the Anchorage airport. 

Our itinerary was rather complex. We left on Thursday night, March 19th, and flew from Anchorage to Minneapolis on a red eye. On Friday morning, we flew from Minneapolis to Charlotte. on Friday afternoon we flew from Charlotte to New York. On Friday night, we flew from New York City to Moscow on another red eye (our second one in a row). After a six hour layover in Moscow, we flew from Moscow to Prague where we finally landed on Saturday night. Our friend, Kelly Prudek picked us up from the airport and drove us to where we'd be staying in Prague. We slept well that night! Before you think we're crazy for embarking on such an intense itinerary, please consider that we booked the itinerary using airline miles and points and that we intentionally picked at least one of the cities due to the possibility of visiting friends.

Our connection time was too short to meet up with friends in Minneapolis. But in Charlotte, we visited with our friend, Marah, who interned at the camp last summer. Even though our visit was only an hour or so, we were so glad to be able to catch up with her face to face.

We have friends in Moscow, and we were excited about the prospect of visiting with them, especially since our layover was originally scheduled to be close to 8 hours long. However, in order to get out of the international transit zone of the airport, we would have had to purchase visas costing roughly $700 each. It may have been possible to wave to our friends through a plexiglas barrier at the airport, but airport security may not have liked that. So instead we had to settle for hanging out in the airport for approximately 6 hours.

So we drank some coffee from a vending machine...

Perused a selection of t-shirts in vending machines we found to be in rather poor taste...

And had our fill of people-watching at Moscow's busy airport.

We left our home in Alaska on Thursday evening and finally arrived in Prague late Saturday night.

We were quite tired by the time our heads hit the pillows.