Off to Asia

Sept 11-12 (Tues-Wed)

Already time to leave for Nepal. Been a whirlwind, less than 2 weeks after agreeing to come on the mission trip with Journey Church. We got the kids to school (Katie was dropped off early) and headed down to Kenosha to meet up with everyone at 9:30. Everybody’s bags were loaded by 10 and we headed to O’hare. After boarding it turned out that the flight was not fully booked and we all got to spread out! I had a window seat on this leg of the flight, and with moving around had no one directly next to me. This was approximately 13 hour flight so it was nice to be able to have a little extra leg room. I ended trying to sleep early on in the flight to get a jump start on transitioning to Nepali time, in total I slept about 2-3 hours. The best airline food I probably ever had (lamb, almost like a shepherds pie) came relatively early in the flight. I also watched a few movies to pass the time (Christopher Robin, Ready Player One, The Greatest Showman)

It was amazing seeing the different landscapes as the sun rose and morning went on. How brown and barren the middle east looked, the oil platforms in the Persian Gulf. We landed in Abu Dhabi around 11 local time.

It's a scorcher    O__O

Our home for the last 13 hours!

After maybe an hour we began to board the next flight, as the time change really started to bother me. This was probably 2am central time, and 13 hours sitting on a plane. I probably ended up crashing within 30 minutes of takeoff, and slept the whole 4 hour ride, interrupted but relatively solidly.  We had some issues once we disembarked, mainly one of our bags was lost, as well as having to pay some customs fees for the Jeep parts in our luggage, but everyone was safe and we made it without much incident, only some lost time. Arriving at the hotel we had a quick rundown of tomorrow’s schedule and room assignments, so it was almost midnight by the time I got to sleep. I never would have made it the entire way to the hotel without the sleep during that 2nd flight.