The World Traveler Returns...

Hola pollos! (For you non-Spanish spakers that's HEY CHICKENS!!!) I promise that this strange way to address my friends is indeed a term of endearment, not a putdown. (Insert Jena Parker quote here). Guatemala was the experience of a LIFETIME- if you have not had an opportunity to do short term missions work you absolutely must! Through ten airports (or five airports twice), three countries, three states, one ten hour delay in Dallas, sleeping on cement floors or any other place availiable, a hotel, some wonderful fresh pineapple and eight days we became experienced travelers. I had not ridden a plane in about six years, (note that's pre-9/11) since going to Los Angeles in 2000. If you think that you have never been attacked by Satan, try letting him know you're going on a mission trip. We were not even half way to KCI (at four a.m.) when the tire on one of the church vans decides to explode. On the highway. At seventy miles an hour. Not only did the tire explode, but something hit the antifreeze and that too began leaking all over the road after we had stopped. Imagine this...you are going to work on your merry way at an ungodly hour of the morning and you see twenty shivering teenagers in shorts and flip flops huddled at the top of a ditch on the side of the road. Do you stop to help? Absolutely not! So after about half an hour Mark tells us to head on down the road, about half a mile or so to the Rojo Mojo (aka red church van). Piling 22 people into a 14 passenger van was, exciting to say the least. For the remaining hour to KCI I sat half on a seat, half on the floor with four people next to me and someone's feet in my face and someone else sprawled across my lap. You want to talk about bonding?? Fast forward about nine hours. At this point the members of our team are in what we'll call the traveler's coma. I was particularly depressed because I'd just spent $10.95 on my LUNCH consisting of a sandwich and a smoothie. Although Dallas Fort Worth is, by comparison a travelers paradise when juxtaposed to KCI, NO ONE wants to spend ten hours in any airport terminal, no matter how nice. Just how did Tom Hank's character do it in that movie? So, we weary travelers see that it is finally time for our flight to arrive (praise God!), but we see no plane. An hour of anxious waiting later, we learn that due to lightning storms our plane could not land and had to return to Houston to refuel. Okay. I'm okay with another short wait....we're okay with that! Not short. Flight left at 6 pm. We get to El Salvador after a ridiculously long and boring flight in the dark. Because our flight was so late, the airline had to put us up in THE MOST AMAZING, BEAUTIFUL HOTEL EVER overnight. We ate dinner at about 11 pm- a smorgasbord of gourment El Salvadorian food, 95% of which I did not recognize- but it was so good. The pineapple in that beautiful country, and all the fruit for that matter tastes as if it just came off the tree. It was incredible. The flight to Guatemala left at 9 am the next day and we, in our day old clothes arrived safely. This experience was.... beyond description, beyond words- thoroughly wonderful. Check out this picture of this beautiful country: