Sunday, March 17, 2013

Home

We are home.

It's hard to believe that Spring Break is over already and that we're actually all home (even MTU should be home by now), and enjoying a day of relaxing before classes start again tomorrow.  This trip went so fast and it just doesn't feel like it should be done yet.  I definitely enjoyed being able to sleep on my own bed with a clean pillow though!

For our last day together, we went to the City Museum in St. Louis, MO.  If you've never been there before, it's well worth the visit! There isn't a lot of actual museum about it, but tunnels, caves, slides, crazy staircases, a 10-story slide, towers to climb and tiny spaces to go through.  It's a giant jungle gym for people of all ages. We went last year and had a great time, so we decided to go back this year to help break up the drive and have some fun together before we started splitting off to go home.

At City Museum, Baleigh, Casey, Kelly and Nicole decided to try and find all of the smallest areas possible to squeeze through (there are a lot!) while Ryan and Drew ran on the hamster wheel.  All of us did the 10-story slide (not recommended for those recovering from car sickness!) and climbed in the towers outside.  Dakota, Nate and Brett all slid along one of the tower chutes on their backs and tried to convince others to go to, but no one else felt the urge to try it.  Trista, Hannah, Peter and Jenny had fun playing dodgeball in the ball pits and a bunch of the students from Van 1 made yet another music video while playing.  It was a lot of fun and the perfect way to stretch out all of the kinks and cramps from sitting in the car for 24 hours.

We left St. Louis around 3 and everything was going great.  We managed to find our way out of the city, despite the construction on almost every corner, and were cruising along towards Bloomington when Brandon got sick.  At first we thought that the couple people who had the stomach flu had food poisoning, but when 6 people wound up sick throughout different days, EMT Jon decided it wasn't food related.  There must have been some bug that someone picked up and very graciously shared with everyone else (their mom taught them well).

We had dinner at Steak'n'Shake in Bloomington, IL where we said goodbye to Scott, Megan, Dakota, Brandon and Nicole.  We had to jumpstart their van after a light was left on for 9 days in the Wal-Mart parking lot, but everything seemed to be running fine when they left.  We got a text from them a few hours later and Brandon was still sick which was making for a longer drive home, but they're all still really glad they came and hoping to come again next year.

As we continued on the road and dropped more people off, the extra van space became a luxury for those trying to sleep.  Casey found the that 2 bucket seats in the mini-van made a great bed and Kevin L. was stretched out on the back bench.  Andrea was dropped off in Joliet and then we made two other drop and runs in the Grand Rapids area for Hannah, Peter, Cassie S, Nate, Brett and Kelly.  It's amazing how  much more room the vans had the last hour of the trip!

Joe, Jon and Matt had the hard driving shift from the MI border to Big Rapids.  As co-pilots got sleepier and everyone else in your van is snoring, it makes it hard to stay awake!  The freezing cold from opening and closing van doors definitely helped as did the walkie-talkie games and conversations about billboards, speed limits and cartoon characters.

We finally pulled into Big Rapids at 3:48a.m.  Everyone helped unload the vans and get them cleaned out.  Then, while the students spread out between friends or the ministry houses,  Joe, Baleigh, Mitch and I ran the vans back to Grand Rapids.  We finally got home around 7:45 and promptly crashed for the next several hours.

Overall, it was a fantastic trip.  We were gone for just shy of 10 days, drove 3,506 miles and spent approximately 80 hours in the vans, went through  8 states and 2 countries, built 2 houses from the ground up and got to share God's love in a tangible way to those in a city that so many have forgotten. .

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