Oh the Places You’ll Go

Oh, the places I have gone; and in such short time.  Last week Wednesday, September 5^th launch started in Chicago.  We had training, briefing, and such for a couple days along with time spent in our teams and squad.  Being back with my World Race family felt great; even though I had only met them for a week back in July, I was already close with them.
 

Praying for a random guy that toured us for a bit around Chicago. 
 

During my time in Chicago I had my first opportunity to explore a big city and just let me say I am thankful for being from a small town.  After a few days in Chicago, we flew to New York on Saturday, September 8^th.
We arrived in New York around midnight and had a layover until 1:50 pm on Sunday, September 9^th.  So naturally, we wanted to make the World Race as much of an experience as we could, we stayed up all night walking the city.  This was my second big city in a matter of a few days!  The night started off trying to manage our way off of the Air-Train which connects the airport to the New York subway system.  After riding the subway for about an hour we arrived to our destination.  I finally got to see Times Square; even though to be honest I kind of hated it.  It’s just a bunch of lights and gross sidewalks.  After Times Square we took the subway to go and see the World Trade Center site and prayed over it.  From that point, we decided to pick up some breakfast and enjoy a sunrise on the Brooklyn Bridge.  After the sunrise, we walked through a little bit of Brooklyn and managed our way back to the subway in order to get back to the airport.

                We then flew out of New York in the afternoon in order to catch our connecting flight in Atlanta to Johannesburg, South Africa.  Flying out of Atlanta commenced our 15 hour plane ride over the Atlantic Ocean to arrive in Johannesburg.  After going through customs, collecting our bags, and getting some food we made our way to the bus which took us to our ministry location.  We arrived at our location by about 10:00 pm on Monday, September 10.

Sunset in Johannesburg.
               
We have been here for the past two days just kind of getting settled and allowing teams to get in touch with their ministry contacts.  Let me tell you, it has been chaos!  Having teams going to four different countries in one month (a World Race record) is quite the hassle to organize bus routes and what not.  Today, Wednesday, September 12 teams started leaving to the bus station in order to catch their 15+ hour bus rides to their ministry locations.  My team along with three others are possibly staying here where we’re at, well at least we were originally supposed to.  It’s more than likely however now that we will be going to the city known as Pretoria to work with some contacts there.  The reason for this is because the ministry contact we have here currently in Johannesburg was setup literally the day before we left Chicago so there’s actually not much for us to do here.  However, we’re not sure exactly what we will be doing in Pretoria yet.