Preparing to Travel

First let me highly suggest NOT getting sick. Shortly after I posted my last update, I started running a fever. That left me pretty much out of commission for about 2-1/2 days.

So I got sick Thursday afternoon. Cliff came in from Virginia late Thursday evening. Then he left about 8am to do the Austin run. I took the girls to the farm for the last time before the trip. Cliff got back from Austin around 2. He took the girls to taekwon do and dropped the girls at their evening activities. Vivian went to Open Gym for some gymnastics fun. Emma spent Friday night, all day Saturday, and Saturday night at the church for Disciple Now weekend. I think I fell asleep around 8pm. Friday night was supposed to be our opportunity for one last “date night” before the trip. Oh, well.

Saturday was not much better for me, but we had things we needed to do. About all I could handle was going to the bank to assure that we could access funds overseas. It was more involved than we thought it would be, but it was not bad. I still had a fever, so it seemed to take a lot longer than it probably did. Cliff and Vivian did some shopping for last minute items (long underwear and such). Emma was at D-Now. I slept.

Sunday, I awoke feeling a bit better. We met Emma at church. Our pastor prepared a sermon on prayer. Shortly into the sermon he stopped and called Cliff and me up to the front for prayer. He also invited anyone else in the congregation with a prayer need to come up as well. He had the staff and other church leaders there to pray with people. One of our youth pastors prayed with us. It was a very moving experience for me. I am aware of only one way Josh could have prayed as specifically as he did, and that is through divine inspiration. By the time we left church, my fever was gone.

To be completely ready to go, we needed copies of certain documents and a photo album. Being sick, I was not able to get that done when I wanted to have it done. So it came down to Sunday night before leaving Monday morning. And it literally took all night. It seemed to be a comedy of errors all piling up. I sent the digital pictures to Walgreens online. Their machine broke. They called me to tell me the machine was broken. I sent the pictures to another Walgreens. Then I got an email from the first Walgreens that my pictures were ready. I went to pick them up and got this really rude woman who insisted that she had called me to tell me that the machine was broken. True, but the email led me to believe that the machine was fixed and my pictures were ready. By then it was too late to go to the other Walgreens (not a 24-hr store), so I had to find another way to do pictures. Same thing happened with finding a place to make copies. Just one thing after another! Finally I ended up at a 24 hour FedEx Office for the copies and another 24 hour Walgreens for the pictures. Finished around 1:30am and still had to pack. Yea! Went to bed at 3:30am.

So the moral of this story is DON’T GET SICK!! But I must admit it wasn’t all bad. I probably had too much to do and would have been miserable to live with while I tried to get it all done. By getting sick, I had to focus on only the most important things.