Traveling Mercies

This is it! We leave tomorrow morning, Wednesday, bright and early. We'll leave home about 6:30 am, travel to Sioux Falls, SD, and get on a 10:30 am flight. We fly first to Chicago, and then have only 40 minutes to catch our overseas flight. If you think of it, please lift up our travels. We have a LOT of luggage, 13 checked pieces, and are really fervently praying that it will all make that quick connection in a notoriously busy airport. We were only going to have 11 pieces, but today we arrived at the post office with two 50-lb boxes of children's books, intending to ship them surface mail (using an m-bag) to our home in Asia. Unfortunately, since May 15th, the rates have drastically changed, and to send it via m-bag was going to be more expensive than to send it priority mail! The cost of the priority mail? $250 for one box. OH MY! Well, the books inside those boxes are not worth anywhere near $500, so instead we will pay the airline an extra fee in order to take them as extra pieces of "luggage." Thankfully we found this out the day before we are leaving so that we still had the airline option! If we had left them for my parents to ship, we would have really been in a pickle!

In other recent mishaps, I had recently purchased some luggage online. When I paid for it online, I saw that the billing address was correct but neglected to clarify the shipping address, and it was shipped to Louisville! All last week, we were wondering why it did not arrive, and finally after tracking it online, John discovered my mistake. We quickly called the company and they said that UPS would not re-deliver a package after failing delivery in another state, so I re-ordered the luggage and made sure it would be sent here, to Iowa. The customer service representative assured me that it would be here by Tuesday, today.

Then this morning about 10, the luggage arrived! Wow, PTL! However, then this afternoon, about 2, the other luggage arrived! Oops . . . turns out the Louisville post office had a forwarding address for me and so had forwarded it on, so now we have more luggage than we bargained for. Thankfully again, the company (Land's End) was very gracious and are just sending another UPS person to pick up the extra set later this week.

So, I'm hoping we've already had our share of mishaps. If you think of us on Wednesday, the 12th, please say a little prayer for traveling mercies. We hope it will be an uneventful trip. If all goes well, we will arrive back at our home in Asia on Thursday evening at 10pm, (Thursday morning in the States). Some dear friends have already been to our apartment, to clean and make it ready for us to just fall in bed that first night, so we are extra EXTRA thankful for that.

Thanks for your thoughts! Next time, Lord willing, I'll be writing from the other side of the world!