A typical day on the World Race is anything but
typical. For you to get a feel for what
it is we get to do on some days, I’ll recount my last Wednesday for you who
read this blog.
It started
by being woken up by God early in the morning (He’s been doing this a lot
lately). I started to read His Word and
then my housemate Matt asked me if I would be willing to go into town, and
possibly Bucharest, with him. Matt was going to be traveling home the next
day and needed to get to the airport.
See, AIM has a rule that no one travels alone, believe me, it’s a very
good rule. So Paul and I said that we
would go with him if needed. I asked him
when we needed to leave, and he told me we had to be out the door in roughly 30
minutes. So I dilly dallied around for
25 minutes and when the others were ready we took off for the town only to find
we had 25 minutes to get to the bus station….which is 35 minutes away. We determined that a run/walk was in order,
so we alternated between running and walking the entire time and made it to the
bus station with one minute to spare!
Too bad the bus was early and we still missed it. So we started to walk some more when the guys
decided we should just stop and pray for a ride to come and take us into
town. No more than two minutes after we
stopped praying did a car pull up and tell us and another Romanian man to hop
in. Thank you God!
We get
dropped off in town and head to the mall because they have free wifi
throughout. Well, we get to the mall at
around 9am only to find out they don’t
open until 10am. A little discouraged, and hungry, we decided
to go to the local McDonald’s for food.
Just an FYI to those who love McDonald’s breakfast…they don’t have it in
Romania, they
only serve the lunch/dinner menu, even at 9amJ. Once we got our food and sat down, we
happened to see a sign that said “Wifi hotspot!” Sweetness!
We hopped on the World Wide Web and started searching for plane tickets
from Tangu Mures to Bucharest and
found the cheapest for $605…the next cheapest was $1035. Planes are out and Paul and I will be going
to Bucharest!
We left
McDonalds and headed to the bus station and got there right as the bus was
about to leave, luckily we didn’t miss this one. The only problem with this one was it was A
LOT more expensive than we anticipated it to be based of the internet…I’m
guessing things don’t get updated nearly as often as they do in the
States. We had enough money to get on
the bus, so we did and left for the six hour bus ride to Bucharest!
I had received
a call earlier in the day from one of our contacts and found out that the
airport Matt had to go to was actually an hour before Bucharest,
and that we had to try to ask the bus driver to stop early. The problem with that is that the bus driver
doesn’t speak English, and we don’t speak Romanian or Hungarian (the two most
popular languages of Romania). God blessed us again though, He put a woman
on the bus who spoke English and Romanian!
We were able to talk to her for a little bit and found out that she is
getting married on Saturday! Through our
chats she told us she would be more than willing to talk to the bus driver for
us, another total blessing. When we made
a pit stop for the bus driver to get food, she talked to him and reported to us
that he would make the stop…for 10 Lei.
Another problem arose….we didn’t have 10 Lei….we had 6. So what are Racers to do when they have no
money and need it…PRAY! And pray we did.
We asked God to provide miraculously and sure enough, we each started to
reach in our pockets “just to make sure we didn’t miss any cash” and what do we
find? More money! With what each of us found we had a total of,
you guessed it, 10 Lei! Matt is getting
to the airport without going to Bucharest!
With that
much out of the way, we pulled up near the airport and dropped Matt off and
Paul and I kept on towards our destination just so we could catch a bus and
come all the way back the 6 hours to Tangu Mures. We arrived at our destination at roughly 6 pm and our English speaking friend told us
the next bus heading back wouldn’t leave until 7:30….so
we had an hour and a half to kill. We
thought it would be good to find an ATM or cash exchange so we could actually
get on the bus, so that’s what we did.
We got our cash and got back to the bus station and waited. The bus pulled up around 7:10 and we paid our fare and got some chips and pop
(aka dinner) and settled in for the long trek home. Lucky for us, the bus wasn’t nearly as
crowded this time and we had two rows to ourselves so we were able to stretch
out a bit (not likely to happen again on the Race, so we took full
advantage). Paul and I got to talking
and figured that from the bus stop back to our place in Stejeris, it was
roughly 20 miles and we for sure didn’t want to walk that far (we didn’t have
enough money for a cab and two guys hitchhiking at midnight doesn’t look the
greatest). After we passed up our city
we convinced the driver to let us off early, so he pulled over and let us
out….we estimated we still had roughly 8 miles to go. We start walking and figured that it can’t
hurt to try hitchhiking, worse case scenario is that they just pass us up. After what felt like the 100th car
had passed us up, I told Paul that it was probably pointless to even as the
trucks, none has stopped for us the entire time we’ve been in Romania….5
seconds after the last word exited my mouth a semi truck pulled over and let us
in. I think God did that just because I
said it wouldn’t happen.
We hopped
in and headed back to our town. We thanked
our driver the entire time and then he dropped us off near our street. We got out and started walking and realized
very quickly that everything was pitch black and we were going to be relying on
God to get us home, because we had no idea where we were and couldn’t see
anything past 3-4 feet. After a short
while we reached a corn field (there are a TON near us) and decided to press on
into it. Shortly after we enter the cornfield,
Paul pulls out this statement “Have you ever seen ‘Children of the Corn’?” Seriously?
Why ask that question at that time?!
I said no, and that I didn’t plan on it either. Luckily I like Paul, so the question didn’t
really bother me all that much. Then, up
in the distance, we saw a light…and it was coming from a house! We figured we couldn’t be too far from home,
and as it turned out, it was our neighbor’s house!
We got home
at roughly 2am, and we started at
around 8am. From what I’ve heard…we can expect more of
these days to come. Good thing God put
me on a sweet team and we can handle such events!
Just an FYI, Denise and I still need to raise $9428.06. If you can help, please click on the “Please
Support Me!” tab on the left side of the page.
Thank you so much for all of your prayers, we appreciate every one of
them! We love you!
