Day 1: International Travelling always has great stories

Monday, August 13, 2013

Finally, Monday, the day we were leaving had arrived!  We had to say goodbye to two of our teammates, Nick and Eric, who are going to join us in the Netherlands in 2 weeks or so.  We—Steve, Molly, Shelby, and I—load our stuff onto the buses and ride over to O’Hare International Airport.  Molly and Steve beat Shelby and me, so the two of us had to take our bags to meet them.  This included my two rolling suitcases, Shelby’s rolling suitcase, and the extra bag henceforth referred to as “The Duffel”.  A little background: after we arrived at briefing, we received book after book after book of things we needed to bring with us to the Netherlands, but none of us really had any extra weight in our suitcases to bring them!  But since Shelby only had one suitcase, we decided to buy an extra bag and put all of our heavy and overweight things into that bag.  SO, this bag included 6 STINT Playbooks (about 5 lbs each), and basically our team’s “library” of books and other things (like boots with the fur) that were too heavy for our suitcase.  Anyways, I put The Duffel on top of my rolling suitcase to make it easier to carry.  However, because The Duffel was SO HEAVY, it caused my suitcase to not roll properly or very well at all!  So as I’m pushing this suitcase and The Duffel through the airport, rolling my other suitcase along with it and my backpack secured on my back, the suitcase decides to basically stop and fall over with me directly behind it.  And if any of you know Newton’s First Law of Motion—objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon an outside force—then you know what happened to me: I was acted upon by the suitcase, forcing me to stop, but not in an upright position.  I fell on top of my suitcases, face first towards the floor, barely catching myself from a total floor-face connection.  So just picture this: a 22-year old girl lying face-first on 2 suitcases, in the middle of the airport, just laughing.  Yep…that’s me.  Everyone just kind of stopped and stared!  Shelby turned around, laughing hysterically, asked me if I was okay.  Everyone else said nothing, probably laughing.  It’s such a great way to start a 20 or so hour trip to the Netherlands!

We finally get all the bags to the check-out counter and we planned to weigh each of our 8 suitcases to try to get them all under 50lbs so we don’t have to pay overweight fees!  After about 30 minutes of rearranging, weighing over and over, and sharing our items with each other (to put in each other’s suitcases), we MIRACULOUSLY got all of our bags under or at least close enough!!  And we saved ourselves $200!  It’s the little blessings, right?!  And I have to give a shout-out to our man Rosco of United Airlines, who was the guy checking all of our bags!  So friendly and so gracious to our confusion and wackiness!         

After all those adventures, we got through security, ate some food at Chili’s, went to our gate (our gate number changed twice), and just relaxed!  Possibly the greatest highlight though was seeing my teammate Steve’s face through the entire process, especially at the gate and on the plane!  Steve hadn’t flown on a plane since about 6^th grade (~10 years)!  He was SO giddy about the whole adventure, like a little kid in a candy shop; but clearly just PURE JOY on his face!  At Makemie Woods (the camp I worked at my three summers during college), we like to ask each other the question “Where have you seen God today?”  On Monday, it was definitely in Steve’s face!  That joy can only come from the One who gives it, our Father!