We are Family...It's CRAZY!
Holy Land Tour – Final Blog
We are Family…its CRAZY!
Well folks I’m sorry for the delay in this final blog. We had some technical difficulties the last couple of days in Jerusalem and then you can imagine the “jet lag” upon returning home. We were back in our Jerusalem hotel, The Knights Palace, the last 2 nights before coming home and we had the entire group together and healthy! We had a last day of touring with Becca then a free day on Sunday before making the long flight back to the states Monday so I have lots to share! Since I normally give yall daily fitbit readings I thought it would be fitting to now give you the GRAND TOTAL for 10/8-8/22!! You are going to lose your mind when you see this…Flights of stairs -611 (that is SIX HUNDRED & ELEVEN), miles – 84.65 (so, yea, we totally walked to Austin) steps - 206,116, and calories burned (we needed it after all that pita) – 41,707. Now to be upfront, there were some that did less and even a couple of rockstars that did more. But the numbers I have provided you all week have been what I have done so you can get information from the same source. The CRAZY thing is that we all made it!!! Well, all accept my sweet blister family. They had to be deflated before I got home as they were getting to big for their britches.
Some fun facts since we last talked…
Our last night in Nof Ginosar (Sea of Gallilee) was great. Some of the ladies and I stayed up and talked about the CRAZY things we have seen and how blessed we are to have been able to do this adventure. After we finished chatting it up we said our goodnights and headed to our rooms. Now, Ruth and I had decided to be super smart and did some laundry the night before since we had 2 days to let them dry. (no dryers seen the entire trip) Well the circulation apparently wasn’t that of which is optimal for drying laundry so we started hanging them all over our room that morning before we went out for the day. We even hung some t-shirts and pants on the porch/patio thingy (we were on the 1st floor) and when we returned they were dry. The outside clearly had the right temperature to dry our clothes. Now the other items left very wet in our room were items that most would not think best to hang out for the world to see. Ruthie and I came up with a “completely brilliant plan”, or so we thought. We would hang all of the “personal items” on the porch/balcony when we went to bed since it would be dark and we would be up before anyone was really moving around and could grab them and pack them away then. So we did just that, hung the personals our to dry and went to bed in hopes of dry items in the morning. Alarm goes off, Ruth gets up and opens the patio door, then says “OH NO”. I jumped up (ok maybe not jumped as my entire body felt as if I had just wrested in the WWE Championship) and I said, “Did the cats get them?” Then she springs it on me…”no it wasn’t the cats. They have a sprinkler system and all of our clothes are now soaked.” Well this didn’t go as planned. #AdventuresWithRuth&Sarah
You remember Papa T? Ben’s daddy? Well I just love that man. And, if you know me well you know that if I love you a lot I will prank you and tease you and joke with you. Well, I did this with most of the people on this trip because I love them and we had a great time laughing together. But, Papa T was really in the prime spot. Not only do I adore him, and he’s funny, he can take a good joke, but he also say in front of me in the bus most days. One day we went through a check point and we all had to take out our passports. We then moved on to the next teaching site and as I was getting off the bus I noticed he left his passport on the seat in the bus. Now who can just walk by that? Not I said the brown cow. So I swiped the passport then informed the pastor that I was in possession of this most precious item belonging to his father. At first Ben just went to give it back to his dad to which I quickly jumped in and snatched it back. You can’t ruin this slam-dunk! It was then that Ben-Jammin realized we were in prank mode and he joined in the effort by telling his dad that he will need his passport at the next site. Papa T said Ok and then kept on doing what he was doing. I then couldn’t wait any longer. I asked if he had ever been out of the country and if so did they stamp his passport (all of which I knew the answers to since I was holding the golden ticket). He said yes and I asked to see it. He then started the pat down. You know the pat down when you are trying to find your phone or your glasses or your keys. He then started going through his bag and I could see the anxiety start to creep up so I gently slipped it between his back and the seat then said, “Maybe you’re sitting on it”. So he got up and THERE IT WAS. We all died laughing and he was relieved yet ready to wring my neck. He warned me that he’d get me back…I doubted this effort. Fast-forward to the next day or 2 and I got back on the bus after a teaching site and went to put the camera in the camera bag when “what to my wondering eyes should appear”, but a GINORMOUS bug. I’m not gunna lie people….I’m almost had to change my pants and you know my backups were soaked from the sprinkler so that wouldn’t have been good. My heart was racing, my BP was out the roof and the search for the culprit began. I blamed the Hearnes, the Bryants, then Papa T who played it like a pro. Until he let that little grin out. I took the plastic repulsive creature out of my bag and threw him out of the bus.