Now four days into the new semester, I think I should use my precious breathing time wisely before the wave of deadlines and homework pounds me into the ground. So where do I begin...
Last Sunday, after a measly 6 hours of sleep (if know you me, I am no morning person, but I have also found that I'm not a night person. I guess that makes me a sleepy person), I regretfully forced myself from my beautiful, warm bed in
my gorgeous, joy-creating pink bedroom, and slowly began to prepare myself for a long day of traveling. Traveling east. Away from home. Leaving California behind.
The first part of the journey was uneventful. Making it to the Oakland airport with 1.5 hours to spare, Dad and I stood in the line that zigzagged six times through the line dividers and then extended into the next part of the building and past the second set of automatic double doors. Wasn't that fun. When we made it up to the front of the line, the lady behind the counter called us into the self-check-your-baggage thing. The girl next to me put her bag up on the scale which skyrocketed and didn't stop till it hit 53. The baggage lady looked up and told the girl that she had to take things out to make it 50 lbs. I got nervous. I knew that my bag had weighed 49.5 lbs when I flew home. Besides the 1 lb chocolate bar, I had purchased several new articles of clothing. My turn came, and I held my breath as the scale tipped up to 52. The lady sighed, told me not to let it happen again and placed a green tag on my purple bag that informed everyone that this bag was "overweight".
After saying goodbye to Dad, I wound my way through security, got undressed--ok, it wasn't that bad, but when you're worried about how much your bag is going to weigh, you end up wearing a ton of stuff. So I had to take off my running shoes, jacket, watch and place my computer in a separate bin. Either way, I made it though without being the subject of a search and made my way to a very crowed gate. My fellow travel buddy, Mitchell Deacon, soon joined me and we scouted for a place to sit. The number of people, as we soon found out, was due to the fact that the flight before us had failed to take off on time. So there we sat. Soon, a young family took the seats directly across from us. I found myself staring at a young boy, immensely enjoying his saltine crackers. I came to this conclusion due to the amount of crumbs that spewed from his mouth and onto the seat and floor beneath him.
Nearly 1.5 hours after we were supposed to take off, I was officially making my way east. Thanks to Mr. Carle who let me into his classroom during church on Sabbath, I was able to print off my boarding pass and secure A39 as my place in line (Did I mention that I'm flying Southwest?) Thus I was able to secure a window relatively near the front of the pane as well as a middle seat for Mitchell.
I guess that I can say I was glad that it did not register in my mind at the beginning of the flight that, because we had taken off late, we would be landing late--almost a full hour late--and that our shuttle that was to take us from Nashville to Chattanooga was to leave 15 minutes after we were going to land. Uh oh. I am very thankful that I was not traveling alone because I sometimes seem to overreact just a little bit when something goes wrong. Soon I found myself jogging though the airport to keep up with Mitchell's power walk to the shuttle stop. It was still there! We told the driver that we just needed to grab our luggage, which would only take 10 minutes, and then be right out. Well, we were wrong. Our luggage took over half an hour to appear on the conveyor belt. When we finally made it back out to the shuttle stop, there was no shuttle.
Leaving my things with Mitch, I ran in to find a restroom. When I returned, the 7:30 shuttle had appeared along with 5 others who had missed the 6:30 one (that's the one that we were supposed to be on). I stood there, shivering, watching people file into the shuttle who were supposed to be there. With three seats left, the driver looked at the 7 of us hoping to get on and selected Mitch and I and another girl from Southern to take the remaining three seats. I was so relieved! After jamming our things into the overly full van, I squeezed into the very back seat, listening to the driver grumbling about leaving 10 minutes behind schedule and making sure that we knew 4 of us had to fit in the back. "Fit" is not the word that I'd use. We all had to practically sit on each other, stuffing our carry-ons under our feet. I think I fell asleep for about 4 minutes. Mitch was out for longer. However, none of us could sleep when we hit a fog bank and the driver decided to continue along the freeway at 70 mph. All of us in the back seat were trying to figure out how she could see where she was going. I knew that I hadn't paid her to kill me off...
After entering into the Eastern time zone, we made it to the shuttle station at about 11:00pm. The girl who had also been chosen to get on the 7:30 shuttle said that she didn't have a ride back to the school, so while Mitch went to get his car, I found out that her name was Vanessa and that she was from Oregon. After starting the 20 minute-ish drive to the school, we ended up sharing information about where we had gone for high school and why we had chosen Southern. Vanessa said that one of her good friends had come out with her to Southern last year but that this year she was a student missionary in the Marshall Islands. I got all excited and asked what her name was: Jamie. See, one of my close friends, Carrie Cloke (who's blog you can find to the right), is also a student missionary down in the Marshall Islands this year and her roommate down there just happens to be Jamie, Vanessa's friend! What a small world we live in! What an Adventist fish bowl!!!
When Mitch dropped us off at the dorm, it was 11:30pm. And I had a class at 9:00 the next morning, which was actually only 6:00 am my body's time. What a way to kick off the new semester, huh?
