Who says travel days aren’t fun?
We left the hotel we’d stopped at Tuesday morning at 8 am and crossed the border into Moldova around noon…
At 3:30, we reached our first destination of Chisinau. Where, instead of having time to get money out of an ATM, get a new SIM card so the phone would work, buying water and dinner and getting on the 7:30 pm train to Ocnita, we were told we were catching the 4:00 pm train and please move quickly.
Once on the train, our team assessed our situation. We had less than half the money we needed. We had no functional phone. We had little to no water. And we had not really eaten lunch and had only a random mix of snacks that would end up being dinner. Oh, and to the best of our knowledge, our contact knew to pick us up earlier than we’d arranged, though we weren’t completely for sure…. But we were together and on our way to our ministry contact. We’d be there at 10 pm (which we thought was way better than the planned 2 am) and could figure out the rest then…
Until…
And it’s the “until” that’s always fun…
Until after one stop at 8 pm, when the train starts going back the way we came instead of forward!
Since we had the room in the train car and had spent the previous day crammed in a bus, the team was spread out in the car, but most of us looked up at the same time. At that moment when we realized we were no longer going the correct direction. A silent slew of questions passed between us: What time were we supposed to get off? Did we miss our stop? Were we supposed to change trains? What’s going on? Anybody else think things just got interesting?
After some broken English conversations with people who had just joined our car, we got told we were still okay.
Turns out (from what we could figure out), the train switched tracks and that’s why we changed directions!
So now we just had to get off at the right stop and pray that our contact was there to meet us. At the appropriate time, we donned all our gear and waited for the train to stop. The only person waiting on the dark platform was a man in a hoodie…who turned out to be our contact and was waving to us before we even got off the train! He was all smiles and cheerfulness, though he did share that he would have preferred we’d taken the later train cause the one we took was the worst one in Moldova!
Glad we found that out afterwards!
May any travels you have be as exciting and as blessed as the ones we get to have on the Race!
Until next time!!
