Our flight was supposed to leave Accra on Thursday at 9:40am local time (5:40am EST), but due to a problem with the detection system we took off around 11:30am local time. Overall the flight was good and we made up an hour in the air, landing at 6:20pm EST. From there we each left to find our connecting flight. Mine happened to be in another terminal so there was lots of running around for a while after customs to find the shuttle and get to the next gate. When we arrived there it seemed like everyone was leaving from the same gate!
Turns out there was bad weather earlier in the day which delayed a lot of flights. Although we boarded the plane just before 9pm, we didn't take off until 2am! After such a long flight before it and being pretty tired I was a little upset at how long we had to wait . . . until I met Betty. I had purposefully chosen my seat for this flight so I would be near the back in a window seat, but when I boarded the plane someone was sitting there. She asked if I could trade seats with her so she could sit with her husband. How could I say no? This put me a little further up on an aisle. At that point I had been sitting in a window seat for the past 12 hours so that didn't bother me to much. In the window seat sat an elderly lady that I later learned was Betty. She was traveling from Kathmandu, Nepal where she lives. I asked her how long it took to fly here. As we counted up all her flights and layovers we discovered that she had been traveling for 40 hours already! And when we got to Norfolk she still had to take a shuttle to Portsmouth! This helped me put everything in perspective so that delay in our flight wasn't such a big deal anymore.
We finally landed in Norfolk at 2:45am, gathered my bags, and headed home. It's funny the things I've really noticed so far. As we came in for landing I almost cried at the thought of being able to brush my teeth using water from my sink! Silly, but it was such a blessing. My car also seemed to run smoother on the roads after all the bumps and potholes in Ghana and the fact that most cars are stick shift. And going to sleep was so hard . . . it was quiet! I'm still not entirely adjusted to where I am. Sometimes I forget where I was just a couple days ago while other times I have a hard time believing I'm back in the States now.
Prayer Requests:
- Pray for the members of our team as we re-adjust to time zones and culture while processing all we've seen and done over the past couple weeks.
Praises:
- We made it home! No one got sick on the trip and God surely met us there!
No comments:
Post a Comment