HE MADE IT! He's in Vladivostok right now. Called me this morning. He was near the harbor and had bought himself an ice cream cone to celebrate. Now if we can get him out of there in the next couple days...

August 29

Well, the end is in sight. I just finished talking to Abe. He is at Spassk. Kostya, the director there, came and met Abe yesterday morning and biked with him the whole day. Abe has been praying for the villages and towns and people as he goes, but on the bike you can't do that together, so they stopped every time there was a sign for a village and prayed together. Obviously it slowed the trip down as there were about 25 or so villages and so they didn't arrive until 9:30 at night when it was quite dark already.
I can hear the weariness in Abe's voice even though he rested today. He said someone asked him if he was anxious to get home. He said THAT is an understatement. :) He is dropping his tent and a few things there as Kostya has made arrangements for him to stay with people. He has a two days' ride to Vladivostok and then still has to buy plane tickets home. So you can pray that he will get good connections. The importance of this still lies on his needing to be out of the country on time. I have a feeling he won't be wanting to look at a bike for a long time!

August 27

Since I last wrote Abe has had a couple of good days of travel. He actually made 140 K (85 miles) today, and he said he didn't know how he did it because the road is still bad.And he was really tired, and suffering some pain because of the accident the other day. Tomorrow he only has to go 120 K, if he can manage that. Then I think he said he'll be about 260 K (150 mile) from Vladivostok, so the end is in sight. Someone is arranging his lodging every night now with fellow believers. Yesterday he had passed into Primoria province, the final province. I don't know exactly where he is now, but tomorrow night he hopes to be in Spassk.

August 25

I have neglected this blog the last couple of days when I should have written because some of you do not receive the prayer updates. Things have been a little tense for the last 24 hours or so. Abe's bicycle was "hit" by a car. Abe thinks looking back on it that the guy probably had purposely driven up behind him and 'nudged' his bicycle to give him a scare, but the upshot was that Abe grabbed the car to steady himself, thinking that the car would pull over, and instead the guy sped up and drove off, causing Abe to fall because the back wheel had been bent out of shape. So, though he had made a lot of kilometers that day, he ended up bruised and scratched up and walking the last kilometers. He called yesterday to tell me what had happened.

I called him today and he said someone had driven him back to Khabarovsk to look for another wheel for his bike, most of which took all day, and by the time he paid for the wheel and the driver, cost over $200 US. He had only ridden 20 kilometers and was in his tent ready for bed when we spoke. He hadn't slept much the night before, probably a bit of the shock from it. He is concerned because the road ahead is not good, full of pot holes, so narrow in some places he said that trucks have a hard time staying in their lane, and the traffic is relatively heavy and fast. Add to that the high risk of DUI and safety is a major concern. He is trying to ride the white side line as it is not possible to ride on the shoulder. Often it is just gravel and very treacherous for a bicycle. He does have telephone contact with friends there. That was how he was able to get back to Khabarovsk. Actually Abe worked in this area clear back in 1989, and a couple of these men--who are now Training Center Directors--he has known all of this time.

He did get his registration documents but when they were brought to him he discovered that a couple of them are missing and the office can't find them. So, this week is proving to be one of the most difficult out of the whole trip even though he is on the home stretch. He said he has about another 620 kilometers (370 miles) to go, so the timing will be very tight with having lost a whole day of travel, and of course he is extremely concerned about the safety.

August 22--and moving right along!

I talked to Abe again today and he sounded MUCH better. Turns out he seemed to have some food poisoning yesterday, and even though it wasn't severe at all, it explains why he was feeling so lousy. Today he had had a full day, preaching in the morning, spending all afternoon with a couple who wanted to help him with his bike tire, speaking to the youth in the late afternoon giving his testimony, and talking to marrieds over shish kabobs (good protein!!!). He did not do this kind of thing on his other trips, but even though he had to give out I think he found it spiritually refreshing.

The couple who helped him with the bike had showed up at the church in the morning--even though they didn't belong to that church. They both are sports enthusiasts and were keen to help him get his tire problems sorted out, which took several hours because he has very large tires, and evidently that isn't popular there. The man said when he woke up in the morning he just felt like they should go to this church instead of their own :)

Abe also said he is grateful for all the blessings (and I'm sure he will be full of stories to tell when he returns), even the little ones that a person usually overlooks, like having the wind to your back.

He cannot get registered tomorrow as that office is not open, so will have to wait till Tues, but if they don't get it done in the morning he will have to go on anyway and sort out how to get his documents afterwards. He just needs the biking time. So we are praying that they will do the documents first thing so that he doesn't run into complications.

August 21

Abe is in Khabarovsk--but it was rough getting there and he is pretty tired. After I talked to him last, the mountains got worse, and the roads were bad for bicycles. Not really paved, just tar and gravel poured over, and most of it pretty rough stuff, so he had a flat, and his spare wasn't all that solid so he moved all his bags from the back of the bike to the front to make it as light as possible and then rode slowly, and made it, eventually.

So, he will be in Khabarovsk Sunday and then Monday will try to get his registration with the police, and another tire, and hopes to be on his way again Tuesday, Lord willing. I think he has about a 3 days ride until he reaches one of our training center directors. He will stay with them for several days and then hit the last stretch. It will be quite mountainous again and the roads that direction are....MMM....shall we say, not good.

He sounded weary. He's staying at an empty Bible school, there's no hot water. He hadn't eaten well the last couple days so his system is upset. But, I'm sure a couple days rest will put all to rights again.

August 18

And Wednesday it is! Talked to Abe a couple of hours ago. He sounded really good--probably because things are going good :) The anticipated mountains were not nearly as bad as the ones he started out with in Chita, even though several people had warned him about it.

The word seems to be passed along among believers that he is around so a couple times people have come and looked for him on the road and chatted for a bit, or in the case of today they picked him up and took him into town for a good breakfast and a sauna that was pre-arranged (okay it was a banya, but I'm not explaining that now) and had several people gathered to hear him speak. Even though that dropped 5 hours from his schedule he is ahead of what he had anticipated.

For those with map access he plans on being in Birobidzhan by tomorrow, and on the map that looks like just a couple hundred kilometers from Khabarovsk. The weather has also cleared. So overall he is pretty excited. The cell phone connection isn't bad although his voice tends to be blotted out for 5 or 10 seconds at a time which means I have to piece together the conversation. He was under a train bridge when I talked to him, and we also had to pause while a train passed by!