Sayounara, bon voyage, vaya con dios, gute reise...

No matter how you say it, we wish you safe travel. Enjoy the experience! We'll be thinking about you and following along on the blog.

With best wishes from trip alternates: Susan Earp, Chantal Perry and Elizabeth Severance

GSE Send Off Party!

On September 20th, 2009 Our GSE Japan team met for the last time before our departure to Japan! The event was held at Terry B's Restaurant in Dexter, Michiagn and hosted by the Dexter Rotary Club. We had a great turn out of Rotary members and the team's family members! The team would like to send out a big THANK YOU! To our sponsoring Rotary Clubs, the GSE committee and all the support we have recieved from District 6380 in our prepartions for our trip!

Also a thank you to the Outbound Australia Team for showing their support and helping us through the process and for "passing the hat" on to Team Japan!

16 days till departure...

The Team met for our last official 'business' meeting on September 12th at Lori's house in Dexter, Michigan. With a countdown of only 16 days now, everyone is getting pretty excited! The main focus of our meeting was finishing up last minute details and perfecting our Japanese presentations. We all took turns at presenting our introductions to each other in Japanese and all did quite well!!! Thanks to the help of Tamie for helping with our pronounciation! and also a big Thanks to Nicole on the Canadian side for all her help with the presentation as well!

I think we are all feeling a little better now about speaking Japanese...well at least for our introductions!

Reminder: Sunday, September 20th is our send off party at Terry B's Restaurant in Dexter, Michigan from 1400-1600 h.

27 days to go!!!WooHoo!!!

We are all getting very excited. We received our itinerary and it jammed packed full of what will become awesome experiences! We're busy fine tuning our presentations, finishing up our gifts and wondering how we are going pack everything! We have been learning our japanese

translations, as you can see in the pic below Jennifer is in deep concentration at one of our recent "coaching" sessions. Thanks again Nicole for being so patient with us and repeating, repeating, repeating. We're are going to sound awesome!

Jen and I also did an informal presentation to the Tilbury Rotary Club (Jen's sponsor) We presented on the GSE process and preparations for Japan. I did my presentation in public for the first time amidst some butterflies, while Jen translated. We were able to show off our hand made squashbook gifts, our letters of endorsement from dignitaries and talk briefly about our itinerary. They wished us safe travels and gave Jen a great send off!