Monday, October 24, 2005

The England Journal: Saturday 15 October

Well, the trip was a really good one. First off, it was the first mission trip for my entire family: me, Sheryl, and Kinsey. Secondly, it was to England. More on that on another day perhaps...

Anyway, here's the journal starting from the Saturday...

Saturday 15 October

This was a pretty difficult day travelwise. We left Nashville at 2:30 pm on Friday and got to Chicago at about 4. After our layover, we took off at 6:30. I had a great flight myself. Apparently slept for 5 hours and halfway through Batman Begins. Kinsey slept for about 4 and Sheryl for almost 1. She did not have a good flight at all. But we landed at 8 am at Heathrow.

Travelling through Heathrow wasn’t very fun either, trying to drag our stroller and bags and the rest of our stuff, plus simply traveling with 11 people at varying speeds. We got through customs and onto the Heathrow Express pretty well. From there, it was a quick walk over to St. Pancras station, then a fast run to the 10:30 train for Loughborough, which we got to just in time. We had to spread out over a lot of the train and find little holes to put our luggage. Both Kinsey and Sheryl fell asleep and I worked on my sermon.

It took us about 90 minutes to get to Loughborough and get picked up by Mark Hill, the paid minister at the Loughborough church. He took us to the building itself (built in 1889 for 500 pounds). We dropped some of our stuff off and went out on the town for a bit. There was a fair going on so we wandered around that and ate lunch at a little Italian place.

After lunch, we wandered around the town some more: walking through Queen’s Park, seeing the parish church of Loughborough and I even got a Chelsea Football Club jersey for 25 pounds. We went back to the church to pick up our stuff, and then went to Mark’s place to plan for the week.

It was there that I learned that I wasn’t actually preaching on Sunday, something I’d been really looking forward to. There had been some miscommunication and there was another preacher scheduled to come in. I was obviously disappointed, but it seems like a good opportunity to learn some well-deserved humility.

We talked about the rest of the week and then went out and got some fish and chips for supper. Holy cow, their fish are huge. You have to hold the whole thing in both hands and they don’t skimp on the chips either. As a result I think the six of us left at Mark’s house went through a couple of bottles of ketchup.

After supper, Mark took me, Sheryl, and Kinsey to his parents’ house where we’re staying (although they don’t get here until tomorrow). I ended up watching some football highlights while Sheryl got ready for bed. And now to bed, where we’ll quickly collapse.

Sunday 16 October

1 comment:

LB said...

Wait a second...They showed Batman Begins on our flight? Where was I??

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