Our Trip to Africa

We were blessed by our family here in Texas.  They took up a fund to send us to Africa.  It was a thank you gift for taking care of  Nannie.  It was a wonderful gesture of appreciation to us.  Thank you to all that gave that we could go.  The planning started last April.  Mandy did the research for the tickets.  Joe gave us his best advice as to when we should try to come see him.  Buster had to plan ahead to leave when things should be covered while he was gone.  Our church took up supplies and gifts for us to take with us.  I started packing.  Our church family gave us so much that I had to sort the things to pack in suitcases and boxes to mail.  I packed 4 suitcases with a few clothes of ours tucked in.  We still had enough to mail 5 boxes of things.

The deadline just seemed to speed up on us.  Dec. 31, 2011.  Before we headed out the door we had to untie ourselves from our responsibilities.  Sometimes that is a very difficult thing to do.  Buster takes care of the water for the county of San Augustine.  Then we take care of his mother.  We needed to be sure someone would spend the nights while we were gone.

All packed and ready to go we left home around 10:00 am on the 31st.  You know, I never did think about New Year's Eve or beginning a New Year with big plans of change.  I was concentrating so hard on getting everything packed and getting things that would help the kids in Africa.  We knew we would need to be at the airport 2 hours earlier than our 9:45 pm flight.  We stopped in Lufkin to eat lunch.   I had been so excited that I hadn't slept much for several days before we left.  Buster was actually going to be able to go see what Joe had been doing for the last 10 years. 

We would have left home earlier in the morning, but our sewer system had backed up and Buster had to tend to that before we could leave.  I knew ahead of time that things like that would be happening to try to stop us from going.  The fire alarm went off just as we were putting the suitcases into the trunk.  Buster felt the need to answer that emergency also, but he refrained.  Buster even left his cell phone with Betsy.  He has all the work phone contacts stored in his phone. 

It seemed almost unreal that we were actually on our way to see our grandkids.