Sunday April 8th was Palm Sunday in Georgia. I made my way through streets lined with old women selling greenery to the Christian Community in the Majanishvili district of Tbilisi to sing for the Easter service. It was a beautiful sunny morning, and a lovely celebration. After a day enjoying the warm weather, I got on a bus headed for Trabzon, Turkey. I realized I had made a rookie mistake when I got to the border and found that the only hard currency I had was a couple Georgian lari in coins. Of course the only ATM at the crossing was broken. Luckily the Georgians on the bus proved generous and lent me the equivalent 20 USD for my visa and I didn't have to hitchhike back to a functioning bank machine at 4am!
I met my friends Kiyoshi, Lauren and Leslie at the Trabzon airport, where we rented a car for the week and we set off. It was an awesome week of exploring the steep, winding roads up from the coast into the mountains, across the steppe and back; to little villages, old churches, cold waterfalls, Mt. Ararat and countless cups of tea in Northeastern Turkey.
Perhaps one of the best parts of the adventure was the opportunity to get to know a couple really great people really well. I've found in my time in Georgia it's been easy to meet a lot of people, but not so easy to get to know people really well and make deep connections. I didn't know them real well setting out, but to travel with these three people was a gift. We share a lot, not just in our experiences in Georgia, but also where we are in our in lives, as we begin to look forward to what's next, because all of a sudden, it's just two short months before we're moving on to something new...
