So anyway, I thought I would post some of my pictures from the trip. I won't go into lengthy detail, but I'll atleast tell you a little caption under each picture. Enjoy my trip down memory lane......
(Chris, Nate, Me and Hope waiting in Customs once we were on the island. Cathy got in trouble for taking this picture. The woman you see right above Nate's backpack started yelling "You can't take pictures in here!" right after Cathy snapped this, so needless to say we put our cameras away until we were officially accepted into their country.)
(I can't remember who took this picture, but this is what happens to my hair when all the windows are open in the van and we are going like 40 miles an hour.)
(Here we are at breakfast. Every meal we ate at this table in the hotel restarunat we rotated seats clockwise and the person at the head of the table had to pray for the meal.)
(Here is the group at one of the pastor's churches in Tivoli. I wil never forget this church because a bunch of us got SO carsick on the way to this church. It was over an hour of extremly bumpy and winding roads. I was literally crying at one point because I didn't want to throw up like Ben had in the van.)
(This is Pastor Samuels. He seranaded us in his lovely church. This was the same day wen went to the church in Tivoli.)
(This is me, Erica and Hope on pastor Samuels balcony of his home. Talk about a view!)
Here Hope and I are standing on the street corner evangelizing. I'm sure that soon after this picture was taken we approached the woman coming toward us.)
(Here is Chris modeling his strawa hat. The man with him is the one who weaves and sells the hats.)
(This is Pastor Bill and our driver for the duration of our trip. His name is Pirate. Yup... Pirate.)
(Here is a view of the island from a cliff we were on. We were visiting some old fort. I don't remember a lot of the details, just that we were at a fort and it had to do with a war.)
(Here is the whole group of us on the cliff with the pretty ocean as our backdrop.)
(This is the night I gave my testimony at our crusade/revival meetings. Don't I look a lovely shade of red, and let me tell you it wasn't all from ebarrassment of public speaking. This is what happensto a VERY pale girl with red in her hair when you get her WAY too close to the equator.)
(Here is Terri on the street of one of the villages we went to evangelize in. The name of the village was Gouyave (pronounced gwa-vay) This was, let's just say, one of the more "unsafe" neighborhoods that we visited during our time on the island.)
(Here I am with a group of the local school children from the aforementioned villages. can you find me???)
(We went to eat at some grill place afterwards. College kids hung out there, and it was right on the beach. Some people went and got in the water, but the beach wasn't the cleanest, so I opted to hold some of the groups things so they could run through the disgusting sand with the mangy dogs that hung around there. Yea, I know.. lovely visual.)
(At some point in the afternoon between evangelizing and the crusades we went shopping downtown. Bill and I ventured off while some people were still making purchases and when we saw these phone boothes we knew we had to take a picture in front of them because they were so cool. We were in the Caribbean so of course they would have these british phone boothes.)
(This picture is of Liz trying to make a "horse tie" around my neck using Chris's tie. We were going back to the hotel from our night at Crusades, and I don't know why we started talking about horses, but she said she knew how to do the tie that cowboys use to tie up their horses so they can make a quick getaway if they need to. I know... it's weird, but it made for an interesting picture atleast.)
(This is what the humidity and heat can do to a digital camera. It worked pretty well after this, but I'm not sure what was going on with it here. Anyway, this is Chris, Me, Erica, and Ben loaded into the back of the van ready for our day of evangelizing.)
(So this is a bunch of us on the roadside of the town we were supposed to be evangelizing in. We call this the "ghost town". Apparently there was some holiday we were unaware of and everyone in that town had the day off and was at some festival. Basically we made the trip for nothing. We did run into a boy with a maschette though. That was fun.)
(So once we were done doing our scheduled things Kerry and Terri (our missionaries) surprised us with a visit to a black sand beach. It was gorgeous, and I don't know about you, but I had never seen black sand before.)
(Here I am with Bill and Kerry on a bluff near the black sand beach. We climbed up to see the view, and man was it windy up there. I didn't dare get too close to the edge. yikes! I wasn't quite up for a swim just yet. After the black sand we went to the beach by our hotel. I'll spare you the pasty legged pictures from that part of the day.)
(Here is a picture Chris took of me and Erica on our balcony of our room. This was before our "Day of fun" began.... It was Friday and Kerry and Terri had arranged for us to take a boat to a neighboring island, Petite Martinique, so we could snorkel and swim and just hang out before we had to leave the next day.)
(Here we are on our way to the small island. I am SO white in this picture. Not for long though...)
(Here we are at the little hut on the beach where we ate lunch before we went off on our separate ways to snorkel, bake in the sun, play with a little naked native boy, or a combination of those.)
(This is actually the group of us snorkelers coming back from the even smaller strip of island where we snorkeled off of. It was amazing. We saw a bunch of fish, I saw a jellyfish which I quickly turned and swam away from, and Ben got his foot pricked by a spiky sea urchin. Let me just tell you.... 1 pasty white girl + 2 1/2 hours in the sun, mostly spent in the water with her ENTIRE back of her body exposed to the sun = MANY MANY MANY hours of pain to follow.)
(Pretty much everyone was exhausted by the end of this day, as you can tell from the picture. I couldn't lay down because my entire backside was roasted. Doesn't my hair look lovely as well?? That's the wind for ya....)
(Do I not just look so incredibly miserable in this picture? You can see my swollen arms and face. I have pictures of my back from that fateful day of snorkeling, but I again thought I would spare you the horror. *shudder* Makes me sick just thinking about it...)
(Here we are perched on the railing of the roof of our hotel. I look stiff as a board because my shirt on my back was causing me severe pain. And you know what I had to look forward to later that day??? Over 7 hours of riding on planes. Yipee..... Everyone had the option of going back to the beach by our hotel that day. I opted to face plant into my pillow and sleep for a couple hours. By face plant, I do mean bury my face in my pillow. I couldn't very well lie on my back now could I?)
(This is the view from our plane as we were leaving. This is the college on the island. I think it is mostly the medical school. It was quite impressive. If I was more of a "roughing it" kind of girl I would have considered going to school there. But I'm not, and the humidity was enough to screw my hair up for a couple weeks, so I'm perfectly fine with going to my local nursing school. :))
(And last but not least here I am on the plane from Grenada to Philly.)
It was VERY long plane ride. To top it off, we were late getting into Philly, so when we got off this plane were had to RUN through the Philly airport because they were holding our plane for us so we wouldn't have to wait until the morning for the next flight out. So I'm already tired, I'm in pain, and they expect me to literally RUN through an airport. It was not quite happening. One of the guys did grab my bag for me, which was nice, but the running was just not quite working out for me. Luckily we did catch our plane, and I saw a couple on the plane that we had seen when were leaving Chicago to go to Philly. They're faces lit up and they said "How was your trip?" (They were newlyweds, so they were on cloud nine at this point no matter what time of night it was, after they had to wait over an hour for us to board the plane). I should have said, "Amazing", "Unforgettable", "Life-changing"... but instead I replied with "You don't want to know." I know.. not the best response but once they got a closer look at me they saw why I said that. You could visiblly see them cringe when they noticed my lobster skin.
So yea, I don't remember a whole lot in the next 24 hours after we boarded that plane to Chicago. I do know there was crying involved on the 3 hour bus ride back to my hometown. The tears and the pain were fresh when I got off the bus and my mom, dad, and two sisters were there to greet me. I saw my mom and started bawling, partly because I was exhausted and the other part because all you want when you are sick is your mom. As I walked toward her I should have seen what was coming, but I think my vision was blurred by my tears. Before I could get it out she had enveloped me in a huge bear hug. I literally started screaming and crying even harder. My sisters were like "Mom, I think you're hurting her!!" To her defense it was 3 in the morning and she couldn't tell what I looked like. God love her anyway though. She apologized profusely and everyone said their goodbyes and we headed home. I crashed for the next 10 hours. My mom faithfully was by my side while I slept because once we got home she saw the extent of my burns. It scared her half to death. The next part of the day was a blur. I went to two birthday parties (because of course everyone wanted to see me) so I got to tell about my trip a bagillion times, then I think I came home and crashed again. I don't quite remember.
Anyway... since I was feeling all nostalgic about my trip I thought I would share it with you all. Hope you enjoyed the pictures and captions. I guess I lied about not going into lengthy detail, huh? Of course there were many more pictures and many more stories, but seriously, how long can one blog entry be? Do I win for longest entry ever???
Alright, well I must go to bed because I have a test in the morning and I think I've been working on this post for 2 hours now. Have a good week, and I'll probably post again at the end of the week.
Until................
1 comment:
Thank you for your comment! Looks like an awesome trip you went on!
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