Palenque, Chiapas (Mexico) 7.3.08
After a crazy 66 hours of traveling time, I have finally arrived in Palenque. The journey was crazy! It took 4 planes, 3 buses, and 1 van to get us to our final destination. After leaving Augusta, GA at 2:22 pm on June 28, I arrived in Miami after swinging through the Charlotte airport at 8:30pm. We spent the night in the airport, not getting much sleep. The next morning, our flight left at 7:55 am from Miami to Mexico City. We arrived in Mexico City at about 11:00am.
In Miami, I was given a bank card to use to withdraw money for my team in Mexico city upon our arrival. When I went to check our team account, no money was in it. There was no money in any team accounts (don’t worry I did have my own personal money). So, us team leaders did not think anything of it and went on to catch our 3:30pm flight to Cancun. Upon our arrival in Cancun, we were told that we were racing to Palenque! We were excited, but then realized we had no money to get to Palenque, much less race there. So, after much discussion, we decided to postpone the race and concentrate on getting to Palenque safely.
We boarded a bus to take us to the Cancun bus station. We arrived later than planned and had very few options for bus rides to Palenque (which last about 14 hours). There were only 19 seats left to get us to Palenque on Sunday evening. That meant that some of us had to stay behind, including my team, g:racers, and team BOLD. So, thus began a crazy time of trying to figure out where we were going to stay after the rest of the team left. We were able to find a hotel and God blessed us with pretty nice accommodations there. We were able to sleep and get a hot shower and we even had air conditioning! We left the next morning (Monday, June 30) at 11am on our bus trip to Villahermosa (since there were no bus trips that day directly to Palenque). Villahermosa is about a 2 hour drive from Palenque. During our bus trip to Villahermosa, we were pulled over at a police checkpoint. 3 policemen with automatic rifles came onto our bus to check all of our passports (I’m not trying to scare you, I was not scared, the Police were generally nice, they just happen to carry large guns!). Everything was fine for us, and we were on our way shortly. We finally arrived in Villahermosa at 1am on Tuesday morning (June 30). We were thankfully able to catch a bus to Palenque leaving at 3:20am. After arriving in Palenque at 6 am, we finally arrived at Shekinah Bible Institute at 7am.
Shekinah Bible Institute is where we are staying. It is so beautiful here. It’s very hot and humid, but my home in North Augusta has prepared me for it. It is cooler at night, aka good weather for a ride in the Camaro! My day is mostly spent with my team right now and getting to know each other. I’ll leave more information about what our daily schedule looks like in my next blog!
I love and miss ya’ll!
Jen
