Vidnoye Baby Home Viewed with Google Earth!

In the last few days there have been some developments that warrant a post.

I was trying to use Google Maps of the Moscow Region and Vidnoye to see if I could find Jason's baby home in Vidnoye. I had a general idea of where it was, but just couldn't find it. I posted my dilema to a Yahoo! group for we are members of and someone else was able to pick out the orphanage!

Getting these images really made my day. It's really nice to have this bird's eye view of Jason Alexei's former home.

Here's the first picture showing a wide angle view of the Moscow region.


The jig-jagged blue line running through the center of the shot is the Moscow River. You can see it cuts straight into the heart of the city. The white line that circles the city shows the Moscow city limits. A road like 385 around Atlanta roughly follows the circle around the city. The yellow line shows the straight line distance from Red Square to the Vidnoye Baby Home. Turns out it is only ~23 kilometers. It seemed farther than that when we were there! Guess the roads were curvier than we thought.

The second shot is of Vidnoye showing the location of the Baby Home. I was able to find the statue of Lenin without getting help. When we went to court on Trip #2 we picked up our social worker Nina near the Lenin statue. Nina advocated for us in court. You can also see the North-South road we took to and from Moscow called "Varshavskoye Shassa."


The next one is a zoom of the orphanage building itselt. This is the shot I was really wanting.

The orphanage is the 3-sectioned horseshoe building in the bottom-center of the picture. I have added some text to point out landmarks. Jason's room was on the second floor of the middle building. His window faced out towards the back of the property.

The only other building in the shot that is on the orphanage property is the laundry/cooking building. The playground that was covered in snow when we first visited is to the left of the main building in this shot.

In the picture you can clearly see the large apartment building just outside the baby home casting a long shadow. The warehouse/grungy building just below the apartment building is casting two shadows from its smokestacks. One is circular, the other square. All these little features were very recognizable to us.

What a nice thing to have to share with Jason Alexei someday. If you want to play with Google Earth/Maps yourself, here are the coordinates:

37.6947922095904E 55.54936743619301N

And here's the link:

Link to Google Maps

The other news is that our Alabama readoption hearing for Jason is this coming Wednesday, October 17. It will be the five month anniversary of our homecoming. Having this completed will allow Jason to get access to an Alabama issued certificate of foreign birth whenever he will need one. It will be much more convenient for him to flash the Alabama certificate instead of his Russian birth certificate.

Lastly, we had a great visit with Lori, Antoine, and Simone a couple weeks ago in Mentone, Alabama. It was great to see them and how well Simone is doing. I'll post some pictures from our reunion soon.