Chelyabinsk! Bless you!

I started this post last week. We spent 4 nights and 3 days on the island Olchon in Lake Baikal.  I wanted to write a series of posts that I could then autopost once I had Internet again. But I was simultaneously writing my next two articles for my Chasing Summer column, and I ran out of battery, so I only managed to get the following 2 paragraphs written:

    My friends are awesome. When my status update on Facebook was merely “Chelyabinsk” I got two reactions: one was the title of this post, and the other “xyctzusbsjnj!  See I can punch the keyboard too!” Followed by “Just joking, how is Russia?” When I read comments like that I always feel a pang of homesickness.  I miss my friends, both the ones that are in both my homes, (Newfoundland and Germany) as well as the ones scattered around the world.

     It is what I call part of the curse of travel. As fantastic as it is, you are never completely happy in any one place again. I will be in downtown Stuttgart missing Suzanne, at my favorite coffee shop in St. John's and wish Caroline or Aimee could be there, and then in the middle of Siberia wishing I could introduce Anna to Daniela or Erisa. Travel has brought so many wonderful people into my life, I get greedy and want to keep them!

    My next intention was to finish this in Irkutsk, where we planned to stay overnight and get our Russian registration completed for our second entry into Russia.  When I logged into my email I got horrific news.  One of my dear friends had been run over by a drunk on a motorcycle in South East Asia.  She was there working on her Masters. She is simply a wonderful and fantastic person.  Horrible things happen to good people all the time.  But when it happens to someone you love, you forget the randomness of nature and try to figure out how it could happen to someone the world needs. She is a fighter though, and we believe that though the call was close, she will pull through.  But until she does it is a horrible waiting game.