Saturday, June 18, 2005

Travel Travel Travel

I am now in Brasil writing about what happened in the time since we got here. My wife and I came on a mission trip with our church to visit some of the people we support here. The trip itself was quite an experience. For me it was my longest airplane trip and my first time off of the continent.

We left Seattle at 8am on Thursday. Flew to New York and had our longest layover of the trip. It lasted 4 hours. 2 of which were spent standing in line trying to get new boarding passes. Varig, the airline we were using, changed our plane, seating assignments, and the plane was late leaving. So that was interesting. We finally left the airport and flew for 9 hours to Sao Paulo. Then the instant we got there, we were escorted onto another plane that flew strait to Rio De Janeiro. In Rio we had to go through customs which went smoothly then barely had enough time to re-check our bags and fly to Recife another 5 hours. Getting off the plane in Recife was a relief. 21 hours in the air, I was offically tired of flying.

When we were leaving baggage claim there was quite a surprise. We walk out and there are all of these TV cameras and lights and ballons and banners and lots of people. But they weren't waiting for us. Turns out there was a business man who was on our plane coming back from Irak. He had been taken hostage for 2 days and was very fortunate to have made it out alive. It was a big deal there in town. We were met by Phil and his father Lou Warkentien. They took us to a hotel to get some much needed showering.

More info about the hotel and Recife, next time.

1 comment:

Luke Storer said...

21 hours in the air? That's almost as long as I traveled (24 hours). What did you do to pass the time? watch any good movies?