I just finished my first travel day, or days, really. We started out leaving the hotel in Atlanta, GA, at 7:00am to be on our flight by 10:30am. At this point I really didn’t want to go. I called mom crying. I didn’t want to be leaving my family and friends for 11 months. All of this is really scary and new, two things that I do not love to jump into, but I know that God has called me and I’m trying to trust that He has a plan even though I don’t know what that is yet. So I got on the plane….and found that my day pack barely fit under my seat!
We had a 5 hour flight to the LAX airport in California and then we had a 9 hour layover until our flight to China.
When we went to check our bags for the China flight I found out that there could be no batteries in our checked luggage, so I called my Aunt Gail (my expert packing buddy) to ask her if we had packed any batteries and if we had, where they would be? She knew we had but didn’t know where we put them, so I frantically started looking in my big back pack to see if I could find them. I couldn’t find them anywhere and I was on the edge of tears when Darlene (my team leader) came over to help me look. We never found them so I just checked my back pack and hoped that they weren’t in there. Then, when I was going through security, they stopped me and wanted to look in my day back, so I’m like, oh great! What do they want now? Apparently they didn’t like the baby wipes I had and they wiped them down to test them…. Darn those baby wipes! Needless to say, I got through just fine. God took care of me and these details through the whole thing and was with me every step of the way.
The flight to China was 14 hours. It was the longest flight and the biggest plane I have been on. They fed us two meals on the plane.
We had a 9 hour layover in China. I was bummed because it was foggy and rainy outside and I couldn’t see anything of China out the windows. Everything in the airport was a lot of money, so our team of six used the $15 that we had been given for food and got chips and cookies for lunch/dinner. Chinese bathrooms are interesting – I didn’t use them.
We finally loaded the plane for our last flight to the Philippines! The fight was only 2 hours, so it went by fast.
When we got to Manilla we rode a van to the hostel we are staying at. On the way to the hostel we all were so tired and falling asleep; luckily one of my team mates was being smart and paying attention to where we were going so we didn’t get taken to the wrong place. When we finally got to the hostel it was like a breath of fresh air. We have a room to ourselves with 6 bunk beds, 2 bathrooms and a shower. NO BUGS!! We all stumbled in and went right to sleep. God provided an awesome place to stay and a safe trip getting here!
Looking into our room My bed Common space in the hostel
