The Journey There - Thursday, March 01, 2007

We arrived! God has blessed us with safety and heath so far.

We started our journey at about 1:15 AM March 1, 2007. The HD part of the team began by meeting at HDCH. Mr. Vankampan met us there and prayed over us. From there we headed to Grimsby where we met up with the TD part of the team. We left Grimsby with our last Tim Horton's beverages in hand. When we got to the US border we had a little trouble crossing, but nothing to serious. Everything went well at the Buffalo Airport. I found two kind boys who packed light and therefore where able to take my sewing machines as their luggage.

We flew to Atlanta where we had a stop over. We had to circle around for a bit in Atlanta before we could land because of the weather. The Atlanta airport is HUGE! Our next flight was on the other side of the airport so we took the monorail to the other end. In the airport we saw a vending machine type thing that sold iPods!

Our flight to Mexico was good. It was quite warm when we got off the plane and we got to go off using the stairs! Then we took a shuttle bus to the airport where we went through customs and got out baggage. We had a hard time with the sewing machines there. They wanted the invoice and proof of purchase and stuff like that. We told them that we didn't have it and we weren't sure how much they cost. They let us through this time, but they said that if we wanted to take something again then we have to have that information. When we were leaving the airport we had a lot of stuff to take out so we were going to take things out in stages. We when we went to go back into the airport they wouldn't let us. Thankfully the people still in the airport discovered that they couldn't leave and come back so they paid a Mexican to bring a cart with the rest of the suitcases. The Mexico airport was pretty. There were palm trees everywhere.

We met Santie, who is the director of Belize YWAM. He led us around. We had to take a coach bus from the airport to where our bus was parked. We ended up moving our luggage SOO much! I think we probably had about 60 or more pieces of luggage between all 22 of us. We moved our luggage from the coach bus to this one corner, then we were told to move it to another corner, and then we had to take it across the street and to this other corner and then we had to take it down to street to the bus. There was this Mexican guy who helped me cross the street and then he just stood there and watched us. We weren't sure if he was waiting to steel stuff or if he wanted to help. Eventually we gave him some money and then he helped us move some of our baggage. At 4 PM we boarded the school bus that we had bought. Our bus is quite interesting. The front half of the bus has seats, but not the back. We put all the luggage in the back and some people sat on it. The bus ride to Belize took about 10 hours. We had to stop at the side of the road for a pee break and we stopped at Burger King for dinner. When we got to the Belize border we had to unload the bus again. We brought everything inside and they checked through our bags by actually opening them and rummaging through. We had to pay duty on the sewing machines. It cost $72 American. Santie said that they were very gracious. They could have charged us duty on all of out laptops and cameras and everything, but they didn't. They didn't even look through our bags very thoroughly. We had another two hour bus ride from the Belize border to Belmopan. We stopped on the side of the road for a min to dip out feet in the warm ocean water. We finally arrived at out base at 3AM Belize time, which is 4AM in Canada. Our journey took a total of 27 hours. We were all tired, to say the least.