May 19, 2011

One year ago today was sooo long and busy. We began the day with breakfast at the guest house, then we visited a coffee factory for a tour before lunch. The coffee factory was very interesting. We walked through the entire process from coffee beans to brewed coffee. There were lots of big, loud machines. Seemed crazy to me that we could take babies through the facility, none of us were required to wear a hard hat or anything. But really the only hard part was the room where they were roasting the beans, it was too much for me and I had to go outside, just hard to breathe, the air was so hot and dusty. We enjoyed this experience a lot.

After our outings we finished packing, called home on skype to give them the details of our arrival and visited with the friends we would soon be parted from. 3 families had left the day before, 2 of us would leave this day, then 2 more the next and the final 2 on the following day. Our travel group was already past the last time we would all be together and we enjoyed getting pictures of the entire group of 32. Now we had our last time to be together with more of our new friends.

That evening about 5pm we loaded all our luggage, us and the Stengels, into a van to head to the airport, it was 8am at home. Getting unloaded, checked in and through the first security was the easiest we had had in Africa, but we also had only 6 people so it made sense. We had a lot of time at the airport as we didn't have any desire to miss this flight and didn't need to be anywhere else. When we had all but gone to our gate when we stopped for a break. We got a little snack to eat, used the INTERESTING bathrooms - oh Dillon the stories you had to tell :)

When the time had gotten close enough to our flight we went through our last security in Africa to our gate, the "cell". We waited in there for about an hour to board. We had changed our flights the day before and so had to see what seats were available. It turned out that the Stengels received the last bassinet seats and we had seats a little ways back, but a nice lady switched seats with me so I ended up with a bassinet as well but Jeff was back in our original seat. It was much easier to have the extra room and bed for Isaac and I was across the aisle from friends.

Isaac slept the first few hours, while I watched a movie, but after that he didn't sleep more than 15 min at a time the entire trip-the long trip, on into tomorrow.....




Sheri