Making Connections; North Carolina, Pt 2

Whew!  This post has been in 'draft form' on my computer for a long, long time!  I'll see if I can finally get it finished!  We just haven't stopped!

From Ricky and Aidan's in Morganton, we thought we would try to beat the impending ice storm to Cary.  As you can see from the photos below, it beat us.

one of our hub caps.  those spikes are ice.

I'm only posting these photos now that we have safely returned and moms can no longer worry...

In Cary we went to visit my high school friend, Joy, and her husband, Jason, and their two children.

Jason is an engineer and when he learned about our missing alternator belt, he decided that he and Nathan would figure out how to replace it. Joy and I stayed in the nice, warm indoors and caught up on life. It's cool to see that nearly twenty years after graduating from high school and moving our personal items out of our shared, side-by-side lockers, we still share the same values!  Like us, they have a daughter and a son, and the kids got along great!  

Thanks to the internet chat boards and YouTube videos, the guys got a new belt on, and Nathan learned how to change it again in the future (which he'd have to do less than 24 hours later).  We're going to the shop  Monday morning to see if the pulleys are out of alignment.  Any mechanics out there have other theories why we keep losing belts?

We are grateful for Jason and Joy's hospitality and the blessing of friendships that last over the decades!

Saturday morning we left the B family's home early and drove two miles across town to have the pleasure of meeting another Albanian adoptive family "for real"!  I met Janice on a Bethany forum over six years ago, before we brought Ellie home!  Thankfully she saw here on the blog that we were coming to her town and e-mailed to see if we'd have time for a visit!  We were so glad we did!  I've said this before, but the experience of adoption makes you do things you never thought you'd do before... like invite internet friends to visit your home, and vice versa. :-)

The Albanian adoption community is quite small, so it's always nice to meet someone else who has traveled the same journey, and in this case, now have the pleasure to have met in person.  We had lots and lots to talk about, and before we knew it, we had to be on the road again.  Maybe someday we'll see them again in Albania!  Their daughter "N" would like to return, she says, and we hope she does!  She said the sweetest thing as we were leaving, "Whenever I meet other kids from Albania, I feel like I'm meeting brothers and sisters." 

We are so blessed by the friendships we have made through our journey of adoption -- I really don't know how to explain it, but we are really grateful.  Stay tuned -- if all goes as planned, we are going to meet another Albanian adoptive family 'for real' before this trip is over!