Tough Crowd

You guys are a TOUGH crowd. I thought all the picking on me was going to just be a family gathering thing, but evidently it's going to cross over into the blogging world also! ;)

Anyways, I think most of you want to hear all the details on London, so here it goes!

I left on a Thursday morning. Larissa was fabulous and came to pick me up in her adorable new SUV. We got there without hitting any traffic, and then I zipped right through security leaving me with about two hours to wait before my plane took off. To be entirely honest with you guys, I wasn't thrilled about the idea of sitting alone with nothing to do for two hours, but it turned out great! A friend I hadn't talked to in ages randomly called me and we wound up talking for almost the entire wait, and then my plane began boarding early!

I wound up landed my favorite seat on the plane - emergency exit window seat. I was so excited! AND to make it even better the plane was pretty empty so I ended up with just one other person sharing my row, and God is so cool becuase he sat a very cool believer named Carolyn next to me! Carolyn and her husband are involved with church planting and ministry in Boston - where we are sending a team to help with the opening of a new church planting connected with NETS this Fall. She had been in the DFW area for a conference that dealt with different aspects of church planting, ministry development, church connectivity, etc... She also has a daughter who is about my age who is involved in ministering to the homeless and inner city youth in Boston. We wound up talking for nearly the entire plane ride which was very fun and I learned a TON about what God is doing up in the Boston/ New England area!

We landed in North Carolina about forty minutes ahead of schedule, which left me with a nearly SIX hour layover! The time actually went by a lot faster than I thought it would which was really great! I went and found the gate I was supposed to be flying out of, and then popped over to the Starbucks where I wound up chatting with the barista (baristo?) for a little while - this was the first of MANY times people would try to guess where I was from - he guessed Canada, which definitely wasn't the strangest guess I had during my trip! He then taught me about the Americano, the "skinny", and a few other drinks and gave me a little phamplet that explains a TON about the million different ways you can create your "personal Starbucks beverage". I knew there were a lot of ways you could make Starbucks coffee, but I had no idea there were as many ways as there are, and I would guess that the phamplet only covers part of them! We wound up chatting about work, school, life... for a while and then after that I just settled in, talked to a few people on the phone, and then had a really great quiet time. Since I've been so busy lately it was really nice to have time to really study what I was (Esther) for more than half an hour and just have time to think about everything that has been going on in my life! Then for some reason the area my gate was in was completely dead! I felt like I was in the Terminal for a while which was a little creepy for a few minutes, because I was completely alone in this HUGE space, but on the bright side I was really able to spread out and not feel like I had to have my luggage and purse glued to me the entire time like I did when tons of people were around.

My plane to London also didn't fill up the entire way, so I had another trip where I got the window seat and only one other person on my row. This time the lady who shared my row with me was there on a girls weekend with her two best friends, and they were going to visit her daughter who was studying abroad. These girls were hillarious and kept telling me I made them feel incredibly cool for talking to them which cracked me up because I really think anyone would chat with them! They were so excited about their trip and were possibly the most organized group I have ever seen. They had every minute of their trip scheduled down to the minute. I felt SO bad for them on Monday when it began snowing like crazy, because I'm sure that threw their schedule off a LOT!

Since I ended up with my own row after we all reorganized and moved around, I was able to get a little sleep on the plane which was really great since I normally can't sleep on planes at all. We landed early in London where the sun was just rising and a beautiful day was there to greet us!

More on Day One in London to come...