Travel 11/11/2010

11/11/10 Enroute to London on British Airways flight 194
As predicted, there were both Blue Bell and The Kettle on the way to the airport. Lutherans like tradition or put another way, we seem to hate change! We ran into very little traffic, it was overcast most of the way and I’m sure the Veteran’s Day holiday contributed to the lack of traffic congestion. We arrived at Bush a little before 1pm and immediately began to help with the footlockers, which had just arrived by truck. Some porters actually did a lot of the work, bringing in footlockers on big carts that held about eight of them at a time. We placed baggage tags on each one and made sure they were clear of UPC tracking labels from previous missions. Those of us that are carrying the twelve expensive autorefractor eye exam machines placed our personal items in empty footlocker space set aside for this purpose and we duly noted the locker numbers that held our own belongings. This will make life much easier when we are looking for our individual items late at night after arrival at our lodgings in Nairobi. All of us were assigned two footlockers to be responsible for, which we also noted the numbers from as if they were our own checked luggage. This saves about $400 per locker in shipping, making these missions feasible, since the cost would be prohibitive otherwise. It never ceases to amaze me how well this system, developed over many mission trips by Salem Lutheran Church to the Honduras and Africa works. I’m sure there has been a fair amount of trial and error over the years, but to look at it now is a thing of beauty in its precision. Check-in went very smoothly until we got to the security check area. It was pretty backed up and very warm. Some of the team members were full body scanned with the latest TSA machines and one of our team, who shall remain nameless, was physically searched pretty aggressively. We had about an hour and a half to kill before boarding the plane, time that was well spent renewing acquaintances with friends from previous mission trips, making new friends with first time travelers and placing final phone calls to loved ones before our departure. I am writing this at around 7pm Austin time, over northern Michigan. According to the running totals on the onboard map, we are about as far north as we are going to get and will follow the coast of Newfoundland before heading out over the Atlantic for London. Arrival there should be in about 6 and a half hours, meaning the flight will have been about nine and a half hours in the air. We are flying at about 35,000 feet at nearly 650 miles per hour on a Boeing 747-400. More to follow during our layover at Heathrow.