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!