Almost There

Well the past two months have flown by, and we'll be boarding a plane to Johannesburg on Thursday after staging (like orientation) in Arlington on Wednesday. It's been surreal saying goodbye to people almost everyday, packing, taking care of personal business, and just having a relaxing, fun summer. The anticipation is definitely different than the first time around since we have a much better idea of what to expect and we'll have each other, but it is still pretty difficult to wrap our heads around being out of the country and away from family and friends for the next 2 to 4 years. We're definitely looking forward to visits, and once we get a better idea of our school holidays, we'll let people know so you can start booking your tickets!

Once we arrive in South Africa, we'll continue on to our training site which is about an hour north of Pretoria. The first week we'll live in dorms, but then after that we will move in with our host family. We'll be learning to speak Setswana in addition to technical and other training. Training lasts about 8 weeks and our swearing in will take place on September 17th. We should get our site placement about halfway through training. During training, we won't have much access to the internet, and I'm not sure when we'll be able to get a SIM card for our phone, but we'll update when we can and probably more often when we get to our site.

welcome to our blog

I decided that since we've started telling people about the blog, we might as well post something on here. We graduated Thursday and are now the Master Cramers though I won't believe it until I actually see my diploma. This weekend we will be saying our farewells to Tucson which is a lot harder than I thought it would be, we've really had a wonderful two years here and made some amazing friends. Tuesday we start the trip to Ohio via the Grand Canyon, Moab, across Colorado, and then the not quite as exciting states of Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. We'll be in Jefferson Saturday where we'll hang out for about a month minus our trip to Maine and other fun excursions including Niagara Falls. Then we'll head to Virginia and spend about a month there as well, take trips to NYC, Philly, Richmond, and possibly Chincoteague. Then, July 21st is our staging, probably in either Philly or DC though we won't find out until a month before that. We'll be on a plane out of here on July 23rd.

We're super excited for South Africa. We're ready to get out there, explore, and finally continue our Peace Corps experience. We probably won't update much more before we go, but we're hoping to be able to update pretty regularly while we're there.