I rather like my luxury hotel here at the Addis Regency . I had decided not to go out but spend the day here catching up. So I did some hand laundry and sent the rest out to the hotel laundry. It came back in the morning,,,same day...all wrapped in plastic.

Then I concentrated on entering all my handwritten notes and computer-entered ones into the Travelpod internet blog. In between I went through all my filled sd cards and made sure that all the photos on them had been uploaded. There was a missing sequence of numbers and I was afraid I had lost some photos, but I found it was just a function of using a card that already had stuff on it from before.

I ate from my food stash. I still had some cheese. It is marginally OK, but edible. I supplemented with some dried fruit and gorp-like snack. I shouldn't really be carrying food around for two weeks. I don't need to be hefting the extra weight...but, I guess if I ate it all, I might be hefting the extra weight on me instead .

And that has been it. It took a long time to do the blog entries. I did manage to Skype with Serge and Theo, but we were all kind of distracted I think. It was almost 12 hours difference - I think, 10. It was good to see Theo and know that his Halloween season has begun and will be continuing in the next few days. I don't know if I will be able to lay my hands on a pumpkin for Halloween on the trip north. I hope they have pumpkins.

It is later than I thought and I have to pack up and shower and leave early tomorrow am.

I later found out that Nadine and John, a couple from the second Exodus tour, were also in the hotel this same day, but I did not know it and, since I hardly left my room, I never ran into them. They mentioned that they saw several Western couples with young Ethiopian children and thought that they were newly adoptive parents. Later still, the lady at the airport would mention that this hotel is popular with adopting couples.