Headed to Emmanuel 2017

It is that time of year again!  Time for me to pack up a couple of my kids and spend the next month down in Honduras!!!  We are so excited to be going down.  This year our trip had a couple of 'hiccups' since Alina will have to be back to the States early to participate in fall sports.  Since she wanted to spend as much time as possible down this way, Bob will be headed down here in a week and a half, stay for a week and then Alina will go back with him.

Our trip started with renting a car to get down to O'Hare.  I saw on the news Monday that it was also Day #1 of EAA, and the man at the car rental agency said he had absolutely no cars available due to EAA and had already received 4-5 phone calls that very day checking to see if there were availabilities.  I was glad that I took care of the rental back when I bought the plane tickets to go down to Honduras.  My mom dropped Noah and I off at Avis Car Rental on the east side of Appleton and we brought the 2017 Nissan Altima back to our house for the remainder of the evening.  The suitcase preparation takes a while as we need to make sure we get as close to 50 pounds without going over as possible.  It takes a bit of shuffling around before it's done.

Around 11:30pm on Monday night Alina, Noah & I packed the cars and headed out.  Alina was the first to fall asleep in the car around Milwaukee and Noah was playing games on the Kindle.  We went through a 24-hour McDonald's where I had him and Alina switch places (so Noah would be in the front seat and Alina could stretch out in the back).  I asked him to chat with me from time to time so that I didn't fall asleep...so he kept me awake through to O'Hare and helped me get the toll money out each time.  We dropped the car off at the Avis rental agency down at O'Hare and took the shuttle bus to the airport.  When we went to the kiosk to check in, Alina realized that her bag was over by about a pound.  I got my keys out to rearrange the suitcase and my keys didn't work on her lock.  Thankfully, she had enough in outside pockets (most of it was garbage from last year's travels) to take her down to exactly 50 pounds.

Noah still full of energy at 3am

Checking in went well, and the flight to Houston went well.  We were on United, which is the first time I've flown with them.  I do have to say - I prefer Delta.  We've never flown into Houston before, and the nice part of the connection here is that we were dropped off at gate E11 and had to board the flight to Tegucigalpa at gate E12, so not too much walking.  Many times at Atlanta we have to take the underground tram/subway when we have our connection, so this was a blessing.  We also noticed that at gate E13, that flight (which left at the same time ours did) was headed to San Pedro Sula in Honduras too!

Noah trying to get comfortable after staying awake all night

Alina and I slept a little bit on the first flight, but not Noah waited until this flight.  I think he fell asleep mid-movie!  When we got into Tegucigalpa, the line to head through customs was much longer than usual.  Noah wanted to sleep on the floor as we waited to get through customs.  I found him a pillar to sit up against while we waited to head through the lines.  Alina got finger-printed this year because she is 14.  Noah was a little disappointed that he didn't get finger-printed.  When we got through customs, and got our bags, we met up with Norman.  We knew that our good friends, the Miller family were also coming today so we had to wait an extra 2 hours for them to arrive.  I saw on Facebook (the airport has free Wifi) that they weren't sure if they were going to make their flight out of Miami because their flight to Miami was delayed.  That's the last anyone had heard from them.  We decided to wait anyway, so Noah and Norman put the suitcases in his van and then I took the kids upstairs in the airport to get them some paninis (to avoid more grease since we had quite a bit of fast food the day before).  We exchanged money, and then I got a chip for my cell phone and for my modem so that I could communicate back home and enter these blogs.  American Airlines came in and all of their customers came through...no Miller family.  Norman asked security about them, and then Rachel came out and explained that they got on the plane (just barely) but their luggage did not, so they had to take care of some paperwork and make sure that the bags would get to the orphanage the following day.

We got to Emmanuel around 5pm and a few girls saw us (including Michell), so stopped by to chat.  We chatted for a bit, but went to bed extremely early since we were running on around 1 hour of sleep since Monday morning.