My trip started at 5 AM, as I woke and prepared for this long journey from my home in Phoenix Arizona to Lviv Ukraine. Had been advised to arrive at the airport 2 hours prior to my departing flight, due to the fact that this was an international flight of origin. Feeling nervous about this trip/visit, left home at 6:30 and arrived at the Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix at 7 AM. Getting through all the crowds, arrived at 8 AM to the gate of the connecting flight, a 4-hour Continental Airlines flight to New Jersey. This would prove to be the only flight that departed on time during this entire trip. Arrived in New Jersey on time, there was a 2-hour layover before transferring to an 8 PM, 7 hour LOT Airlines flight to Warsaw. This LOT flight departed 45 minutes late, but managed to arrive almost on time in Warsaw.

During the flight had not been able to sleep much as the anxiety of meeting my relatives for the first time was ever present.

Arrived in Warsaw the next morning at 9 AM. Upon landing was surprised to see that this airport was very small in size as compared to the population of Warsaw. There was another 2-hour layover for my connecting LOT Airlines flight to the Lviv airport, which was to arrive at 1:30 PM on 5-31-01. This connecting flight was late also, but in the interim of idle time, did meet two people from the USA, that were also traveling to Lviv. They were representing the tourism agency of the city of Athens Georgia. They were meeting in Lviv with a delegation of others members of their organization from their state. Seems as if Lviv had requested their assistance in trying to develop a tourism plan for the city of Lviv, to bring travelers from around the world to visit Lviv. In the next few days, I was to understand how Lviv and the rest of Ukraine really need to develop their tourism program.

Also on this particular flight from Warsaw to Lviv, had found out that there was a guy from New York that I had met on an Lviv chat channel, a chat channel that I had been frequenting a lot in the past year to get as much information about the city of Lviv as possible. Through our discussions on this chat channel, we discovered that we had this same flight, so we agreed that we would try and figure out who the other was during our layover in Warsaw until we reached Lviv.