This is a post from a few days ago…
Title credit: my girl, Baby B — not as effective as when you say it, but still… 🙂
Well hey, friends — guess who made it to Indonesia!! It’s me…I made it 🙂 & my whole squad. So there are 28 of us first time racers & then we have 5 alumni racers with us as our leaders. Here’s a picture of us, our mentor Stacy (2nd row all the way to the right), & a couple other leaders who aren’t in the field with us but have worked so hard to get us here. I LOVE these people so I’m stoked for you to see them. If you can’t find me, I’m in the 3rd row and 2nd from the right wearing the Eagles hat — go Eagles!
For launch there was some awesome training in Atlanta & then we were off! Chicago, Tokyo, & then finally Jakarta. We stayed at a hostel & then rushed like crazy to make our train. But real quick, here’s a few pictures at or around our hostel, starting with the beds…
Then there’s the sweet upstairs room we hung out in, sitting around on bean bags & reading. It had an amazing hand-drawn map of Indonesia on the wall surrounded by advice from travelers who have come through already. Beacuase the 4 of us stayed awake all night, when 0630 rolled around Coleman, Logan, AlyO, & I took to the streets in search of some coffee. And though we enjoyed early morning Jakarta, we were pretty sad to find that coffee shops near us didn’t open til 1000!! Still had fun exploring, though 🙂
But back to the train…I honestly thought we had missed the departure time because our cab took so long to get to the hostel to pick us up. The first half of our team had already left for the train station while 3 of us waited behind. On top of our cab’s late arrival, it was parked across the street where traffic was heavy & there literally was no traffic light or stop sign to give us a clear route across — the traffic just kept coming full speed. Candace (Ace) described it brilliantly when she said it was like we were in a game of frogger. We ran across in the rain but they didn’t slow down their commute for us — Ace’s bag even got clipped by a bus! Thankfully, that chick is tough & we piled in the cab. All I could think was how it was day 1 of being in country & I was already separated from my team.
Sounds par for the course.
During training at launch we had a few risk management senarios brought to us & guess whose team “died” because they chose exactly wrong? That’s right — us: the puppy pack (our unofficial name).
***pause — for all you moms who were excited that there is a 30 year old nurse on your baby’s team — I am so sorry to disappoint! I love adventure just as much as they do! But even if I’m not the responsible sort you had hoped for, I DO promise to love your kiddos fiercely!! Hopefully that counts for a lil something…unpause***
For a moment I wondered if we’d be the reason the lecture would be extended an extra half hour as the trainers warned future racers against turning into a team like us. Yikes.
Now — as you can see from the first picture — it was rather chilly in Atlanta, so if you can imagine us running wearing cold weather clothes, carrying a 47lb airporter, AND a backpack stuffed til bursting…yeah, you can probably smell me from there. Sorry about that.
Turns out the tickets we thought we had booked didn’t go through…so now we’re hanging out in the train station for a nice bonus 8 hours. Welcome to world race — this is just how we roll 🙂 & so we blog…with more adventure ahead. We are stoked for what is to come, so the story has barely begun. I’ll soon be showing you where we’re staying & introducing my team. So this is a check in…soon enough I’ll tell you more & go on…
