02 January 2009

Mary called the travel office this morning and we found that we are leaving for our mission on the 29th of January. We will fly American Airlines to Chicago – where we will have a four hour layover so we may get to say goodbye to Jim, Kristy and the girls – and then we transfer to British Airways to travel to London and then South Africa. It sounds like a long, long trip.

The date suggests that the travel office thinks we are going to need for extra training as office missionaries. Since we are not going to do that, we wrote President Mann to see if we could pass on the training and get to the mission earlier. It is interesting that they wanted to keep us here longer than we needed to when we went to Indonesia. We were able to work through that so perhaps we can through this one also.

I checked to see what the luggage limits were and was surprised to find that we not only get two 50 pounds bags each but also we can take as much as 40 pounds as carry on. I don’t think I want to try to carry on two 40 pound bags but it is good to know I can take 25-30 pounds without any problems. This means we can take an extra change of clothes and necessities so if our luggage gets hung up we will have clean clothes and a tooth brush.

“The day dwindles down to a precious few.”

Completely off subject: We have seen two very good movies in the last 8 days. Last week we saw “Valkyrie” and this week we saw ‘Benjamin Button.”