First Day of Trip

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  London, United Kingdom
Wednesday, June 7, 2006

Our summer trip has finally begun! We've been planning this for almost a year: the chance to make a long family trip together. It started as the plan just to visit our church brethren in French-Africa (that is Togo Benin, Cameroon and Rwanda), where Marjolaine, Fiona and Tatiana have never been. To use frequent flyer miles on the OneWorld system, these visits required transiting through London, Ghana, and Kenya. Then we tacked on Mauritius off the coast of Madagascar, to visit the francophone brethren there. This meant a transit via Johannesburg in South Africa. Then a request came for me to help with some leadership training seminars in the Philippines. I was happy to oblige, but this meant an additional transit through Hong Kong, since we would now be using OneWorld around-the-world tickets for Marjolaine and me. By this time at very little extra expense we could tack on Australia (the chance to visit the church office in Brisbane) and New Zealand (both to see the office work there and to visit our old friends the Caudles who are serving in that rather remote assignment). Our Council of Elders is working to encourage unity among our various international areas and, as I currently have the opportunity to serve as one of the international members of the Council, these last visits seemed appropriate and helpful. We used about a third of a million flyer miles for Fiona and Tatiana's tickets and had to buy some flights in Africa for them, but we very happy to be traveling as a family. We're looking forward to the whole trip.

So here we are in London having just spent the night at the Holiday Inn London Heathrow. Our fight to Accra leaves at 14:15.

Yesterday we were up at 03:00. Dave Evans my brother-in-law, who works in MS in the Home Office, kindly picked us up at 04:30 for the drive to the airport. Our first flight was to Chicago, and left at 06:45. The small Brazilian-built Embraer plane (only 3 seats across) had spent the night in Cincinnati, so the American Airlines departure was on time. We had a two-hour layover in Chicago (time for a Venti - a large coffee - from Starbucks!) and then the 7 ½ hour flight to London. We passed much of the time reading; we are traveling with a small library to fill the travel hours. Marjolaine is reading Martin Rees's Our Final Hour about the dangers posed to humanity's survival by various advances in the dissemination of science and disease (He's the Astronomer Royal of the UK and a very respected scientist: he should know whereof he speaks); Fiona finished Frankenstein, which she had to read for next year's English class (she found it surprisingly accessible and quite good), and I started Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture, an interesting history of the role of the Western way of warfare in the dominance of the West in world history. We would take a break sometimes and watch a movie: Firewall, a stock Harrison Ford thriller, or Steve Martin's Pink Panther (a few funny scenes, but overall not nearly as good as the originals). All in all a smooth flight.

We finally arrived in London at 22:40, and after the long walk through Terminal 3, swept quickly through immigration and customs. We waited half an hour for the "Hotel Hoppa" bus that would take us to our hotel for the night (three pounds per adult -children free). I had reserved family room (for the four of us) at an airport hotel, but that didn't show up on the reservation the reception desk had. So we had to discuss that for a minute before they found us a family room. The room was quite small and we could distinctly hear the person in the next room snoring. We were so tired that it didn't stop us from dropping quickly off to sleep about 01:00. It was a long but uncomplicated day, if only all travel days were so easy....

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