Saturday, March 11th.

Hey guys,

Most of you know I was in Louisiana last week with a group from the Rock. Instead of trying to wrap it up in a paragraph or two, or wrapping it up in an excruciatingly long entry, I'm going to take a week off of normal blogging, and blog for the corresponding day a week ago.

Only thing is it's Monday and the trip started Saturday, so expect three separate entries today to cover Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

Also expect sometime this week a link to Adam's City Pages blog. He's been given the chance to blog about last week, so that would be a good thing to read if you're interested in reading more about the trip.



So Saturday, March 11th:

We met at 6am outside my apartment and stuffed our car full of stuff. Say good bye to leg room. We went to Dunn Bros. right away because Lee's bosses gave him a bunch of different gift cards for the trip - Dunn Bros. included. This was the first of a number of men's bathrooms I used throughout the day. What are you going to do when there's a line for the women's and no one is in the men's?? Sometimes you just gotta go!

Rachel and I watched What a Girl Wants until we reached our first stop - Casey's. Sarah lamented over the chocolate that she decided to give up for 40 days:

There are also pictures of Sarah and Rachel pretending this is a typical spring break party week (complete with a 24 pack of beer), Lee waiting outside the men's bathroom for me to come out, Sarah and I holding up cat food, and of course just pictures of Casey's in general. It was kind of a long stop. You'll have to look at the yahoo photos for those (but they're not there yet).

When we got outside, Lee told me he had something for me, he was hiding it behind his back. He told Sarah that she should probably just go ahead and videotape him giving it to me - and so she did.

Lee dropped down on one knee and pulled out some aviator clip-on sunglasses, and said "Christine, will you wear these?" Needless to say, it was a pretty monumentous moment - one I doubt I'll ever forget.

Then we hopped back in the car and drove on. Lee got hot so he tried to turn the vent, but it came off the ceiling:

I showed my love for Rachel with a little present:

I showed my love for Sarah with another little present:

(that's a clump of raisins)

Eventually we found ourselves in Dubuque, Iowa. I was excited because I'd never been to Dubuque, but it was a tad alarming because Dubuque was about an hour and a half east of our route. We missed the group lunch, but it was an adventure, as you can see:

We were in the car and started playing with this little pony that Lee had brought with him. It was pink and purple and it had a leash. It walked, and it also nayed. We took some videos of the pony, and it's friend - a stuffed bear (whom Lee also brought).

We went to Sinclair:



We went to the Country Market Express:

Rachel and I watched Gremlins - Rachel can talk like a Mogwai like no body else can talk like a Mogwai. And if you're ever wondering who Stripe is - he's the leader.

After Gremlins, the adventure got a little bit more adventuresome. It started raining - hard.

Lee was driving and we could see absolutely nothing through the rain. We were listening to the radio and the report said that everyone needed to get themselves to a basement room with no windows asap. Uhhh...We pulled over for a while and let the other groups know what was happening, so that we could all be praying. We reflected for awhile on Matthew when Jesus rebukes his disciples for being so frightened during the storm at sea, and shortly after we prayed and read, the storm just settled. It was really amazing, I think we all were feeling pretty overjoyed about that. As we kept driving a tornado warning went out, and it seemed as though we were going to drive right into it, but we were able to just miss it!

After all that we finally made it to the mall where people had met for dinner, Jodi and Rob's van waited with us as we ate dinner so that we wouldn't be the only van arriving late (how beautiful are they?). Then we drove into the night to Memphis.

We had a good long talk on the way to Memphis about the trinity, and the differences and similarities between Christians and Mormons and Jehova's Witnesses. It was a really interesting conversation, and after awhile we were just reading out verses and just diving into their meanings, and how we interpret them versus how non-Christians interpret them. It was good good conversation.

As we were pulling up to Memphis, "Walking in Memphis" started playing on the CD Jodi had made for us. We BLASTED it. We were just yelling it, we were all so excited to be there!

Those who'd gotten to the church before us had prepared beds for us already and helped with our luggage and stuff - Jodi's van got in a little bit later because there was some bad past-midnight Memphis traffic that they caught on the way in.

And then? We slept.