Address change

Hello everyone!
I just wanted to let everyone know that our address during training has changed to :

Ben and Jennie Bleckley, PCT
Peace Corps
126 Verdoon Street
Sunnyside
Pretoria, South Africa

We recently received an email with language lessons that we need to work on, so we are in the beginning stages of learning Setswana (and by beginning, I really mean beginning!). We will have language lessons for several hours every day during training. We do not know for sure if we will be speaking Setswana during our service, but we will be place with a family who speakes Setswana during our training in July, August and September.
We are getting very excited for our upcoming adventure ( a little over three weeks left until we leave for staging).

Thank you everyone for your support!
Love,
Jennie

Uncle Rans and Aunt Pati's

Here is the next installment of the farewell tour edition!

We arrived at Rans and Pati's house around 3p on Friday May 25th. Pati was still at work so we went to surprise her and then we took a scenic ride back to their house.

We could not have planned the trip better if we had tried because we were able to spend the entire Memorial Day weekend with them. We went on some scenic walks/hikes around the island, played board games, went to point-no-point, the seashell museum, and relaxed on the deck. Here are some pictures from our adventures.

A deer that spent much time munching greens in their forest:

The light house at Point-no-Point

A fish in blue jeans who was kind enough to pose with Ben and I:

Starfish on the pier:

Uncle Rans, Aunt Pati, Me, Ben

After much discussion, we decided that it would be best to leave on the 5:20 ferry to Seattle to avoid commuter traffic. This ended up working really well as we were able to see the sunrise on the ferry.

We made it back into Denver on Wednesday May 30th after spending a night camping near the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Up the Coast- California to Washington

We started on our journey up the western coast on Tuesday May 22nd. This was an amazing leg of the journey for both Ben and I. We started this portion of the trip from Moorpark, CA and headed up the coast on the famous Highway 1.

Some highlights from the first day of the journey were:

Morro Bay (where we ate a picnic lunch and found sand dollars),

San Simeon (beautiful water, beach and pier; as well as home to the Hurst Castle),

Elephant Seals,

Monterey Bay (where we spent the night at Sunset Beach State Park).

Day two found us starting in Monterey Bay. We went across the Golden Gate Bridge and enjoyed lunch at Point Reyes National Seashore. One highlight of this day was making it up to Redwood National Forest to camp.

Day three (Thursday May 24th) was spent driving from Redwood National Forest to Cape Lookout State Park in Oregon. This drive was absolutely beautiful with the forest on one side and spectacular ocean views on the other.

We woke up on Friday and headed out of our campsite to Fort Clatsop National Memorial. We then headed across the (terrifying!) Astoria bridge and headed toward my Aunt and Uncle's house in Bainbridge Island, WA.

This was a drive of a lifetime!

Fun on the road-California

I know many people have been holding their breath to hear about our adventures in California so here goes!

We arrived in Redondo Beach, CA on Friday May 18th after staying a night near Cedar Breaks, UT. For those who do not know, we went to Redondo Beach to spend time with my brother and sister-in-law (Robert and Kristen Olson).



First Ben and I walked down to the beach and enjoyed the palm trees.





After Robert got home we went to a restaurant overlooking the beach to eat dinner with Kristen. We then had a tour of the beach and watched the sun set.

On Saturday Robert drove Ben and I down to San Diego to spend time with Aunt Linda and Uncle Tony. They took us on a tour of the city and we ate lunch together.

On Sunday Robert gave me some boogie-boarding tips and I had a blast making a fool of myself! Here's a video Ben taped:



On Monday Ben and I drove to Simi Valley, CA to spend the day with my Grandmother. We went out to lunch, shopping and she showed us around her new place. We were able to sit and visit with her until dinner.





On Monday night we went out with my Aunt Gail and Uncle Bob and my cousins Alicia and Liz. We stayed Monday night at their house in Moorpark and then began our journey up the west coast.

Grand Junction

We are at a computer in Grand Junction's visitor center charging our batteries so I thought I would say "hey" from Grand Junction. We are very excited to continue our wonderful trip! Pictures will be here soon.
Love,
Jennie

Update: Pictures from the awesome visitor center

How to Get the Most Out of Your Fill-up

Wouldn't you like to know how we make our trip affordable with gas prices on the rise? This video offers an ancient family secret passed down from generation to generation on maximizing gas pumped.

Back in Denver

We're back in Denver tonight preparing the second, longer leg of our epic farewell tour hitting Utah, California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.

We may work over the next week or two to backtrack on our posts and go a little more in depth.
In the mean time, we've updated the map with pictures, captions, and some route information. There are also picture albums without captions. The various albums include:

Wizards Minor League Baseball Game

Fort Wayne Zoo

Milford Lake

If you find this road trip stuff boring and want something more Peace Corps related, check out Doug's blog. He's a good friend of ours doing the Peace Corps in Romania.

Jennie and Ben's Farewell Tour

We're currently in Fort Wayne, Indiana visiting my aunt Stevie. It's the first leg of our epic Farewell Tour, during which time we are going to par-tay like it's 1999. We're visiting relatives across the country during the month of May before we leave for the Peace Corps in July.

I'm on a phone line connection right now, so no pictures or podcasts at present. But you can take a look at our tour map and see what cool things we'll be doing.

More posts soon (we're too busy par-taying like it's 1999 right now).

Assignment Booklets

If anyone's interested, here are some links to the assignment booklets Jennie and I received in the mail:
Jennie's Assignment
Ben's Assignment
South Africa Welcome Book

We're Invited to Serve

Fourteen months after Jennie and I applied, we finally received our invitation last week. The Peace Corps application process can be long. We began filling out the 20 page application in January 2006 and turned in all our initial paperwork in March. Our interview was in late April 2006 and we were nominated for sub-Sahara Africa the next month. Check out our photo album from our application send-off. We were so excited - little did we know it would be another year before we'd even know if we were going!

We were asked to fill out more medical paperwork in July, then in September, and again in January. In February we completed our physicals and in early April 2007, we received our invitation. The Peace Corps is definitely thorough! But they want to make sure we're safe when living in a developing country without immediate access to doctors and our support system of family and friends, and we won't blame them for that.

We are leaving July 16 for South Africa. Jennie will serve as a Capacity Builder for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) fighting HIV/AIDS. I'm going to be a Primary Teacher Training Resource Volunteer. We celebrated our invitee status with a fancy (cheeseburger) dinner and spice cake.

Once we are "in country," we'll receive three months of language, cultural, and job training. In September, we're actually sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers (PCV). That date is the official start of our two years of service. While we're in South Africa, we do have two vacation days a month, but it is unlikely we will return to the United States; the Peace Corps pays for travel to your country of service when you begin, and they pay for the return ticket once your service has concluded, but any other airfare is our responsibility. This is really pretty generous - the Peace Corps is one of very few organizations that covers all expenses for getting to and living in the country of service.

We feel extremely lucky to have this opportunity. Living in another country on the other side of the globe should help us learn a lot about ourselves and where we are in the world. We want to thank our families and friends for the massive amount of support we've received; it means a great deal to us.

So, since we will be gone for so long, on May 10th we're beginning our cross-country farewell tour. We'll post our itinerary up here when it's ready. In the mean time, you can subscribe to receive all our posts on the right side of the screen. If you have a feed reader, you know what to do. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can use the e-mail subscription or learn how to use Google reader.