This is the state that never ends...

...yes, it goes on and on, my friends!

We’re driving through Texas right now (the state that never ends) and counting the oil pumps is quickly putting everyone to sleep.  The last few days of moving fast and hard all day is starting to catch up with a lot of us and people are glad for the chance to take a nap. 

You should be proud of our students.  They worked so hard yesterday!  At Casas, they packed all of the crates for the builds in Acuna and Juarez for the upcoming year, dug out a rock bed, washed all of the rocks and then put them all back, painted trim and moved giant piles of dirt.  They worked really hard and were a huge blessing to the Casas staff.  They went through the gift store after they finished everything and since Casas is beginning a rebranding process, I’m pretty sure we bought them out of hats and most of the sale T-shirts that they had.  Everyone was thrilled to wear a clean shirt and now we all look like a cult or something.

I got interrupted as I was working on this.  We’re now leaving Midland, TX where we stopped at CiCi’s Pizza for dinner (Brittani – great job at convincing Mitch to stop for pizza for dinner!  It was great!) and a quick driver switch.  Justin, Baleigh and Megan are going to take the next shift and we’re going to try and go for a long way and get out of Texas. We’re only 419 miles from Oklahoma City! 

We just got stopped by a family and a woman asked “What are ya’ll?”  Her son, maybe 4 or 5 years old, assumed that we were a band.  Thankfully, Adam has his ukulele on him in the van and he’s playing a song for him.  We’ve also been asked if we’re a track team (we took that one as a compliment! It made us feel in shape even after all of the gas station stops!) and someone else at Golden Corral last night automatically knew we were on spring break and asked what we had been up too.  Thankfully, he didn’t ask if we were homeless like we all assumed they would (we were looking a little scruffy).

Sorry for those sidetrack interruptions.  That’s just a quick example of how we’ve been operating this week – lots of random side comments and distractions.  It amazes me sometimes that we got all the houses up.

Quick recap of last night:  after we left Casas, we went to the church we had arranged to stay in last night and discovered that the group that had the keys was out sight-seeing and we were locked out.  So, we all took the Casas staff out to dinner at Golden Corral looking like homeless, scruffy bums (which is why we were assuming we’d get those comments.  Mitch instructed all of us to reply back that yes, we were homeless and if people offered a place to stay, we were to ask if there was room for us and a few friends.  We all got a good laugh out of it!).  Thankfully, the other group made it back to the church around 10 and we got there in time to shower and relax for awhile. 

The morning started earlier than most of us were hoping/anticipating.  Megan and Carly left for the airport at o’dark thirty and then Megan discovered that El Paso has poorly marked roads as she was doing circles on Fred Wilson Ave trying to get back to the church.  Meanwhile, Derek wound up with a bad case of we’re assuming food poisoning and really didn’t get any sleep after 3:30a.  The other group staying at the church woke up early to make it to their flights home and they tried to be quiet, but it’s hard to get 15+ people out the door quietly when you’re all staying in the same general vicinity. That woke a lot of us up and we all just kinda dozed for a couple hours until we started getting up.  The intent had been to sleep in until 8, but I don’t think many people slept in that late.  A crew left with the vans to try and vacuum all of the Mexico dirt out of them while the rest of us packed, cleaned the church and gave Derek a chance to try and rest a little more. 

We did an extra service project at Casas today – some of the crate supplies that were missing yesterday were delivered this morning and we packed those for them. (Mitch had also left his laptop there and we needed to go back to get it.  We all decided that it was an evil plot between Mitch and Jason to get more work out of all of us). Then we grabbed lunch at Chick-Fil-A with Seth and Tracey (with their 3 week old daughter, Scarlett) and Jason, Amy and their three boys, Jones, Cash and Titus.

I’m continually amazed at the level of maturity the students are showing this year.  Usually by now, people are ready to hurt each other because the personal space is gone, the van ride is long and no matter how hard you try, the work boots still smell like feet that have been crammed in there for 4 days working on a work site.  But, they’re all doing amazingly well.  No one is complaining, Michigan Tech is doing an amazing job of making Ferris students switch vans and it’s been a drama free trip.  So nice!

Time for one more random comment (I’m riding in a van with Mitch, Scott and Joe, all of whom drove the last 6 hours and are living off of caffeine at the moment).  The students are complaining about not being woken up by Mitch yelling at them to get their stinky, sorry carcasses out of bed every morning in Mexico.  But, they kept asking us for a time that we would get them up on the trip and then they would set their alarms for 5-10mins early to get up and be ready before Mitch could wake them up.  The campus ministers in the back are now scheming themed wakeup calls for each morning (pirate, star wars, etc).  They’re highly entertained. And Mitch has spent the last 20 minutes perfecting the cravass area in the van (the long space between the door and the benches) for him to sleep, but is so excited about how he got it all set up, that he’s guessing he might be too excited to sleep in the space he created to sleep.  Meanwhile, Mike, Chris, Cameron, Evan and Brandon are sharing music, Scott is streaming a basketball game on his phone and everyone else in the van is starting to doze off. Only 1,388 miles to go to Big Rapids.

Sometime within the next 12 hours, we should be reaching Tulsa, OK, where we’ll pick up Sanjay and then in Joplin, MO we’re going to take a break and play paintball for awhile!  Derek found this place that has around 100 acres of paintball courses and one of the largest paintball castles around.  We’re excited about the idea! It should be a lot of fun. 

Wow, that was a lot longer than I thought this post was going to be!  If you made it all the way through, I hope you enjoyed hearing about some of the randomness that makes up the Mexico trip.