La Romana The Return - 1 - the wheels on the bus...

Day one – kinda. Actually, it isn’t day one at all because we haven’t been here for a full 24 hours. We have been traveling for almost 24 hours so it feels like it has been a long, long, long day.

Just as I predicted, the day started at the lovely hour of 1:00am (bleh!) where all the Rhode Island folks met and go on the bus. Apparently we got the bus that was upgraded with a hyper-drive and we made it from Rhode Island to Newark, NJ in three hours!

Arriving at 4:00am for a 7:00am flight is always a great experience.

We met up with the folks from Syracuse and Albany and donned our fashionable pinkish, mauve, rose, reddish, nasty hats. See picture below. As a whole family, minus one pharmacist from Maine, we got on the plane and made our way to sunny Santa Domingo.

The flight was fine with just a little bit of turbulence. We grabbed our luggage and a little more (I’ll speak more to that in a bit), and then waited for the final person from Maine to arrive. We waited. We waited. We waited. It was a little more than two hours and spending that time in the food court of the Santa Domingo airport, with the constant din of fast talking Dominicans, crying babies, and complaining Baptists, mixed with the heavy smell of grease made the time feel like days. The final person was greeted with mixed emotions of joy and rage. Lucky him.

Then we had the fun, two-hour ride on the school bus. This time we had the luxury bus that had windows in the front, windows on the side, and a “window” in the floor so we could see the ground. Very classy.

The rest of the evening was pretty standard. We arrived, we ate, we unpacked, and we realized we stole someone’s suitcase. That’s right, we stole a suitcase.

To be fair, no one meant to do it. When you have hundreds of bags to collect it is easy to pick up an extra bag that is not yours. It wasn’t until we were unpacking that we realized that the items in that suitcase were much, much nicer than most of the clothes that were donated. Something was amiss. The major problem – the owner did not put their name on the suitcase. See, your mother was right, put your name on your underwear, your books, your tax forms, and your luggage.

We did the right thing, called the airline, and promised to return the bag… tomorrow. After all, it is late, we are tired, and it would not be safe to go out into the night with a strange piece of luggage. In the meantime, I am going to be praying over the stray luggage, laying hands on it, anointing it with oil, and eventually baptizing the suitcase. I found out that I am preaching tomorrow, so I need to practice on something.

In the meantime – check out this link for something that is more serious and probably has much more useful information on our trip. It is written by a real, live journalist so it has to be good.

Here is a picture of me right before leaving:

Here I am after arriving. Do you see what the bus ride, plane ride, and bus ride has done to me!