Why I hate to fly

        I just now found this post that I had written about three weeks ago and never posted so even though it is a bit late........

     So I am sitting waiting to board in Santiago and they come over the PA system and page me. Generally I would be very privileged to have someone call my name out in a huge crowded building and it would make me feel important and all. Not this time. My first thought was, what did I pack that I was not supposed to pack? I go down to the gate area and they have my luggage and are going through it. In my luggage I have 12 small boxes of a natural treatment medicine that had been donated to SI but was not used and I (in a weaker moment) volunteered to bring it back to the donor. There are 16 small glass vials in each box and it is all written in English and they can’t read it. Just as I almost have them convinced that it is not an illegal substance, I am at my wits end and say. “Look, why don’t I just take it all out of the bag and leave it here?” Wrong thing to say at an airport where they are still not sure what this “substance” is and I am now wanting to take it out, put in in a corner and get on a plane and fly away. Not the best option I could have come up with at the time. Now they are really wondering what it is since I was so anxious to just leave it there. After about an hour of litigation, they put my stuff back in my bag and send me on my way.  The last time I tried to help out someone by taking something back to the states for them, it was a case of about 30 books for another missionary. That time they called me down and went through each book, page by page, to make sure I didn't have drugs that I had supposedly stashed between the pages.

      So I am now I sit in the Miami International airport watching people hurrying to catch a flight or those that are not in a hurry, walk down the middle of the aisle blocking those that are trying to hurry. There are also those that are glued to their phones texting away to some unknown place. I am reminded why I hate flying. It’s not the actual flying that I hate. Ok, well I hate that too, the sitting for hours on a plane with nowhere to go and no room to stretch out. But I am talking more about the parts in between the actual flying. Like the checking in, the waiting between connections, the standing in line in customs, the PA systems saying  #$$&^^@*99aljhh........... BOARDING NOW! Why is it that the only part of the announcement that you can understand is the “boarding now”?

      So that gives you a small taste of why I hate flying. Problem is that when you live where we do, your options are pretty limited as to ways to get back and forth to visit your family.

     Hopefully many of you that are reading this I will get a chance to visit with face to face within the next few weeks. Spending the first week in California doing some fundraising and meeting donors of SI then off the Indiana for another week and a half of meetings and visiting more SI donors and then a week of just hanging out with family and then back to where I am right now, Miami, visiting more SI donors and supporters. It is a pretty full time but I get to spend it with our daughter Marcy so that is an added benefit I guess.