International Easter Rally: Part 1 - The Long Journey

Well, wow. Let's see. Where to start. How about starting with AWESOME. An overused word, but one that fully encompasses the experience of the SCYL in England. I think the best way for me to blog this incredible event is to chronologically take you through the whole thing in a series of posts. So this first post is the Long Journey and will take you from the afternoon we leave our houses in the United States to arrival in London. Most of you will probably not want to read all this. So, don't! But it is important for me to have a written record of an event this big and there just might be a few parents of teens or very interested people who want all the details of this incredible experience.

I cannot describe very much of the departing activities of Cody, as he left out of Chicago, or of our three Canadian SCYL friends (Jordan, Joesph and Ashleigh), as they left out of Toronto a day after we departed. Cody, we were to met in London at Heathrow airport and you will read more on that later. Our Canadian friends flew into Birmingham, England and we did not meet up with them until Sunday evening at Purley Chase Centre. So you will need to find out their stories directly from them. I do know that Cody took a bus to the airport. That is about it.

I left the house at 1 pm on Friday and drove to Celie and Holly's house. The plan was to leave my car at their house and get a ride to the bus terminal to ride down to Logan airport in Boston. Liz, was driving to the bus terminal from Fryeburg and was to met us there. When I arrived at Celie and Holly's house, their dad, Steve kindly offered to drive us all the way from Portland down to Boston Logan. So we loaded into the car, drove over to the bus station to pick up Liz and rode down to Boston. At Logan, we met up with Chris who rode over to the airport with his dad, Lee Woofenden. Everything was going smoothly up until this point. We encountered a slight problem when we went to check in. There was a 13 lb weight limit on our carry on luggage and everyone's bag exceeded this. So, we needed to check more bags than we intended and needed to repack a bit so that everyone had what they needed on the plane. Other than that, everything was fine and it was no real big deal. We arrived early to the airport and had plenty of time before departure to eat dinner. We boarded the plane on time with bellies full of Sbarro pizza. We were blessed on this leg of the journey to be traveling economy premium, which is pretty much business class. Bigger, more comfortable seats, warm moist towels, drinks before take off, more leg room, real china, etc. I am not sure how this happened, as we definitely did not pay more for it, so I assume that either Expedia or God (or both) was looking over us. As this was Chris' first real time on a plane (he flew as a baby but did not remember it), we all made sure that Chris knew that these are NOT the usual flying luxuries. We received confirmation from Cody that his plane was on time meaning that he would arrive at Heathrow nearly two hours before us. So, the four of us departed Logan on Virgin Atlantic bound for London England at 7:45 pm to arrive in London as scheduled at 7:20 am (2:20 am EST). And we had a nice comfortable flight across the pond.