Travel Thursday April 18th and 19th, 2013

We all arrived on time at Redeemer and began loading up the footlockers and our luggage at 8:30am.  Pastor Dave was there and prayed a sending prayer over the team.  We left Redeemer in the rain at 9am and we got to Brenham around 10:45 and stretched,  had a bathroom break and our usual Blue Bell cones so as not to break tradition.

We arrived at Bush International Airport around 12:15pm, unloaded and then Merrillee and I went and parked our vehicles.  It took a little longer than usual to get checked in at KLM counter.  Then we spent over an hour in the security line.  The plane was already almost done boarding when we arrived at our gate.  I was the least one on from our group.  That didn’t really matter too much, because we had to wait 55 minutes to take off due to bad weather to the north and to the east of Houston.  Once we were airborne, the Fasten Seat Belts sign was on for over an hour before we cleared the turbulence.  The rest of the flight was uneventful.  This was our first trip as a team on KLM, we had always been booked on British Air before.    The staff was friendly and the food was good.  We had about a 3 hour layover at the airport in Amsterdam, it is very modern with lots of shops, restaurants and, of course, an overpriced Starbucks.  The team took the opportunity to fill out our Kenya visa applications in advance, which will hopefully save us time when we arrive in Nairobi. 

Both the flight from Houston to Amsterdam and the one from Amsterdam to Nairobi were on well-appointed 747-400’s.  We had a very full flight on our first leg of the trip, but were able to spread out and get a little more comfortable on the last flight, once we were airborne.  The flight crew took great care in making sure people were evenly distributed throughout the aircraft so as to balance out the load.

I got to know some of our team members a little better on each of the flights and during our layovers.  We are all excited about the mission, and Pastor Kevin and I fielded numerous questions about every detail of the trip and the vision clinic.  With a team made up of all first time members, there is a lot of enthusiasm and energy which I’m sure will translate into one of our best clinics yet.  As of this writing, we are scheduled to go on a safari to Lake Naivasha early tomorrow morning and then worship with the overall team in the evening before dinner at Rosa Mystica, the Catholic convent where we stayed the first two nights of our trip last November.  The teams made up of the other 5 churches that have joined us on this mission will use Sunday as a travel day to their respective sites.  We will worship with the congregation in Kiambu, where we will be serving, and will drop off our footlockers there on Sunday as well.  If we hold true to form, we will have lunch at a nice restaurant after church, followed by shopping for supplies for the week and then dinner, a devotion and an early night at Africa Heart, the lodge where we will be staying the rest of the week.

We landed around 8:15pm Nairobi time, got our visas in pretty short order, changed some of our money into Kenyan shillings and then waited for all of the footlockers from every team to arrive.  I got to talk for a while with our friend Rashid, the head of security while we gathered up the last of the footlockers.

Our ride to Rosa Mystica was uneventful, we were assigned rooms and we got to bed around 11pm.  I couldn’t sleep very well, so around 1am (about 5pm Austin time) I was able to phone home to let Adrienne know we had arrived and all was well.