Waiting for the Train at Port Baikal

My friend and travel mate on the Russia trip, Carol Ann Stoney, is shown below

while we were waiting to board the Circum Baikal railway in late May. Carol Ann and her family farm in southern Wisconsin, and I had not met her or any of the other fellow travellers before the trip.

Our backgrounds are fairly different, although we're both only children from the Midwest.

Carol Ann is an amazingly talented and hard working person, always doing some kind of handiwork while sitting in a bus or plane. She and her husband attend a farmer's market in Dubuque, Iowa every Saturday, where they sell mainly vegetables and fruit and samples of her crocheting, embroidery and knitting. Believe it or not,she and her husband has hardly missed a Saturday in 40 years. Carol Ann created a beautiful embroidered table runner for our lovely host in Irkutsk, and was kind enough to add my name.

I really enjoyed travelling with Carol Ann and the other Friendship Force(http://www.friendshipforce.org/) members, mainly from Dubuque but including some from Nevada and Texas. I'm a convert, having recently sent in my application to join the FFI chapter in Montreal. If the people I met on this trip, both American and Russian, are typical of Friendship Force members, I can't think of a nicer group to join.

Addendum in early January, 2017. I was very sorry to learn that Carol Ann and her husband were burned out of their homestead on Christmas Day. They survived, fortunately, but the house was totally destroyed. My thoughts and prayers go out to them.