4 Hour Delay = Smooth Transit

Thanks to Malinda (Darron’s sister) and Steve we were off to a great early start on Tuesday morning.  They dropped us off at 7 a.m. at the Nashville airport.  The ticket agent’s eyes dilated when I handed him our 6 tickets and passports.  That is a lot of seat assignments and baggage tickets to wade through.  However, he tackled them patiently.  After about 20 plus minutes all our 11 check in’s were tagged.  He handed us our tickets and said we were all set.  I asked him how much we owed him for all our extra baggage and he said, “nothing”.  I clarified, “nothing?” “Yes”, he replied, “Have a great trip”.  We had anticipated at least several hundred dollars in extra baggage fee’s.  So we began to count our blessings.

Nathaniel had a nasty head cold.  I was worried about his ears and pressure.  Malinda and I had purchased some decongestant medicine for him, early that morning.  I was afraid they would take it from me, because it was “4 ounces”.  It flew with him in his back pack all the way to Papua, never being taken and he never complained of ear pain.

Our first lay over was in Minnesota.  The flight schedule boards kept saying “delay”.  What was suppose to have been  a 1 1/2 hour lay over turned into 4 hours.  Apparently the flight coming in, there was a passenger who started to hemorrhage and they had to make an emergency landing.  At last we were off to Tokyo.  11 hour flight with rumors that we would not make our connecting flight on to Singapore, because the Tokyo airport closes by 8:00 p.m.

As it turned out, we could not go on to Singapore.  Instead we were to spend the night in Japan, then fly at noon the next day directly to Jakarta (skipping Singapore).  Arriving with about 3 hour lay over before our final flight to Papua.  We were quickly bused to a lovely hotel, where thanks to Delta we were given 3 rooms and a delicious breakfast.  So instead of a 6 hour “sleep” in Singapore we ended up with about 1 4 hours of relaxation time in Japan.  Another blessing.

When we arrived on Friday morning in Papua, friends were there to greet us and help get all our baggage home.  Blessings continue.  All eleven pieces of our checked in baggage came straight through, us not having to pay fee’s on any of our luggage even from Jakarta to Papua.  Can we count the blessings?  We had anticipated that we would have at least several hundred dollars worth of excess baggage fee’s.

Upon arriving home, friends had prepared a hot breakfast.  The fridge was full of bread, juice, milk, granola, fresh fruit and veggies, sandwich spread, peanut butter and jelly. Supper was prepared that evening for us.  Blessings abound.

So that niggle of a  4 hour delay….was really our ticket to an extremely smooth transit to our home, far away.  Thanks always for the many prayers that accompanied us all the way.