D.R. Trip Updates... Day 1: Saturday (March 28)

Well....

We are officially back from the D.R. If you are following my Twitterfeed on this page or in general, you know that.

We got back on Saturday night... April 4. Since I had very little access to the Internet while in the D.R., I didn't get a chance to blog any pictures or any experiences from the week. So I will blog from hindsight... post some pictures and a blog for each day.

You know our difficulties in getting out of Chicago on Friday. If not, click HERE.


Saturday morning, we arrived at the Atlanta airport to a zoo... literally. There were at least 150 people waiting to leave Atlanta through the International gates. And with a similar thunderstorm on the horizon as had canceled flights on Friday looming, everyone was looking to get out quickly.

We got rechecked in, through security and to our gate. We had vouchers left over from the previous day, which we used at the airport for breakfast, coffee (one last Starbucks for me before leaving) and other assorted items.

Only to find our flight delayed.

We ended up being delayed for about 2 hours. There was a problem with the plane that we were supposed to take. So they off-loaded all of our luggage, in the pouring rain, and replaced our plane with another. So we arrived in Santiago 2 hours later than we expected.

One nice thing about the flight to Santiago was that it wasn't crowded at all. So there was plenty of room to spread out.

After arriving in Santiago, getting through immigration, customs, and other assorted lines, we discovered that my luggage hadn't arrived with the rest of the groups. (BUMMER!!!) All that I had in my backpack was a pair of shorts, a pair of underwear and another T-shirt.

More on that later...

After filling out the necessary form, we piled in the bus to head to Casa de Gabriel. On the way to the Casa, John informed us that we would be doing the VBS that we had been planning to do immediately after getting off the bus. This was a little stressful to say the least, considering that we had not done any assigning of roles or much specific preparation.

We managed to pull off the VBS. It didn't go as well as we would have hoped, but it worked. Following the VBS, we got settled, ate dinner and then headed out for some ice cream.

It was a very busy day. The three above pictures are from the VBS. The last photo is the team photo after we arrived.

Jim