I should have stayed awake during geography class

This trip to Novosibirsk just got longer.

For the last 6 months, I've been telling people that we fly into Moscow and then it's a 3-hour flight from Moscow to Novosibirsk, which is where the orphanage is that Ruslan and Zukhran call home.

Wishful thinking.

Fran tells me the flight from Moscow to Novosibirsk is more like 8 hours. So that 8 hours, on top of the 12 hours from NYC to Moscow, not to mentioned the flight from Rochester to NYC means that I will actually be 53 years old by the time we get back from this trip, due to the 27 time zones we will cross, which is now a problem, because the kids won't be old enough to legally drive me to the nursing home.

I had no idea Russia was so big. But then when I got to looking at it more closely, I was like 'wow' that's really really big. Fran tells me it has 11 time zones, compared to the 4 in this country (BTW, we are moving to the Mountain Time Zone, becoming two of only 34 people who actually live in the Mountain Time Zone, so be sure to tell your friends and watch their expressions).

The problem with my miscalculation likely stems from the fact that I measured the distance with my thumb and forefinger on a 13-inch laptop screen. I then held those the thumb and finger in the air, eyeballed the distance, and announced "Looks like three hours." This form of measurement served me well when computing my income taxes, so I was surprised that it let me down in my assessment of flight time.

I now wonder whether we should have selected an adoption region that was muich closer to the Moscow airport, perhaps an orphanage in Concourse C.

If there is good news, Fran says that Aeroflot Airlines -- which is carrying us from Moscow to Novosibirsk -- just this year banned smoking on their flights, which means at least the flight will not be any longer than 8 hours. Had there been smoking, it may have lasted 12 hours if you include all the emergency landings it would have made as Fran would have been pulling down the emergency oxygen masks and triggering the alarms.