The flight to Ethiopia

We left Loogootee Saturday morning, March 7. We are at Cracker Barrel for our final American breakfast...we didn't think we'd get biscuits and gravy in ET and we were right. We got to the Indy airport in plenty of time. Our flight left around 2:30 in the afternoon. After everyone boarded the plane, they told us it was too heavy so some of the luggage would follow on a different plane. When we taxied out of the terminal we saw two of our luggage sitting there on a cart, and we knew there could be trouble!



We made it to the Ethiopian Airline check-in with plenty of time to spare in Dulles. We got our boarding passes and met a few of our travel buddies. We ate supper with Eders, though we were all a little too nervous to want much. We boarded a BIG plane for ET at 8:30pm and then they told us we only had 1 bag on board, the others would come on the next flight to ET, Tues morning...oh well. It was so exciting to be on the plane, especially b/c there were so many Ethiopian people on board. We were really going!!!!

On board ET Air (Shannon behind us)

It was a long flight (though not compared to the way home!). We dozed a little, read a little, watched Madagascar 2 about 3 times, and enjoyed the view. We got to see the French Alps very well, and the Mediterranean Sea too. The desert over Egypt seemed to never end. ET Air is a very nice airline, helpful people and very good service. We landed in Addis Sunday night their time, and took a terrible 2 hours to get our visa and go through customs, then of course fill out missing luggage forms.


There ride to the hotel was about 30 minutes, and though it was dark, we could see the city a bit. We got to see ET driving, with no rules and lots of horn honking. We also saw the friendliness of people in the streets, hugging and holding hands. We also saw the poverty. There were lumps laying under tarps that we thought at first was animals, but we then realized it was people.

When we got to the hotel, we were exhausted and excited. I had a good cry and we prayed together. It was very hard to be there at that moment, but we slept well and that night I "counted our blessings" and the number of things that went right far outnumbered the things that went wrong. Satan was not going to steal our joy. We awoke happy and ready to meet our baby.