There was no UCARE summer camp in 2007 so, instead, I went on a UCARE Route in September of this year. Because of this, for the first time in ten years, I got to spend the whole month of August at home.  I looked forward to it for months–sunny days at the beach, pleasant evenings on the patio, time puttering in the garden.  If only it had been so.  August is a miserable, miserable month in Michigan–hot and muggy, rainy and buggy.  I ended up working lots of hours, and spending many of my free ones hiding in the house from the intolerable heat and humidity, as the garden ran wild.  "Bleah" is all I have to say. 

I flew into Kyiv, but then traveled the very next day to L’viv in the west.  I spent a week there, visiting with family,and traveling to Zakarpattya.  When I returned to Kyiv, there was work to be done preparing for the route, and the parliamentary elections were in full swing.

Our route took us to southern Ukraine and Crimea (Krym).  I was able to revisit some of the places I had first seen in 2006, during the UCARE summer camp in Yalta, but also had a chance to visit, albeit only briefly, many new and interesting sites. 

The route wound through Crimea and then back to Kyiv via Zaporizhya and Dnipropetrovsk, and returning   to Kyiv.  There I had time to shop a bit, visit with family, travel to Chernihiv, and finish the paperwork and photo-editing that still remained from the route. And, of course, there was the nightly election news, culminating in the election itself.

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