Lithuania AIM trip 2019! - Days 1-3

Days 1 and 2 
Sometimes things do not go as planned, but one thing I’ve always learned on missions trips is how to remain flexible. We arrived at MSP Sunday night and met up with everyone else going on the trip. The others that we are joining are from a church in Duluth and they are fearlessly lead by Josiah Tonder (he’s pretty awesome). We all got reacquainted with each other, got some coffee, and then boarded our delayed flight to Chicago. Or so we thought. We ended up being delayed a bit more than we thought. Around 2 hours delayed. Good thing I brought an ample supply of friendship bracelet thread...all of us girls started making them. The flight attendant was very amused. We finally started flying and we all began to realize that we had a very small chance of making our connecting flight to Frankfurt, Germany. We got off of the plane as fast as we could and ran to the other gate (well...some of us ran...some power walked....some just walked). Sadly, we were about 5 minutes too late to that plane. This brings us to sleepover in the Chicago O’Hare airport.

We all decided to fuel up on some McDonalds and started getting comfortable in the chairs. Josiah went to go and figure out ticketing situations with Felicia, while the rest of us tried to sleep. Not only was this airport a bit chilly, but two birds had decided to join our sleepover. I hope those birds are doing okay right now. Josiah ends up getting us the same exact flight the next day. We would be leaving for Germany at 10:45 pm Monday...a bit behind schedule. We all woke up in the morning as rested as we could be and got more coffee and breakfast. The airport was starting to drive us a little stir crazy and we had a good amount of time to kill so we all hopped on a train and did the most tourist thing you can do in Chicago, visit the bean! The bean was wonderful and even more bean-y than it was when I first saw it. We all walked around Millennium Park for a bit and then made our way back to O’Hare. This is where the story gets interesting again. Our tickets got a bit wonky again, but Josiah did a wonderful job with getting everything worked out but we ended up getting split up into two groups on two different planes. At this point we were all just excited that we would finally be in Germany. Half of us had to run for our lives to the gate, but we made our flight! These last two days may have gone a bit different than planned, but we know that God has us in his hands. Soon we will finally be in Lithuania and we all cannot wait! Until next time on the wonderful travel blog!
 -Kayla













Day 3 
We didn’t know airport life could be so draining, as we forgot what day it was exactly 😂 Like Kayla originally said, our team was split into two groups. The minors needed to go with Josiah (I thought I did Carly a favor and sent her with Kayla to keep her comfortable 😬). While they got on an earlier flight to Germany we left about 6 hrs later only to have our flight delayed....AGAIN.... as we arrived later than anticipated in Germany, we then found out we had missed our connecting flight to Lithuania (Josiah had messaged us while we were in the air saying he had taken care of it and rebooked us all on another/later flight). Once we were off the flight- we went to the ticket counter to get our new boarding passes only to find out they couldn't find us in any system. Eventually after going on an hour of jumping through different hoops/ walking from one ticket counter to another- they got all 7 of us on a flight to LITHUANIA 🇱🇹

We landed here around midnight (4pm MN time), found our luggage (the ones that split up from us haven’t gotten their luggage yet 😭) & headed back to the hotel we’re staying at. Ready for showering, changing out of our 3 day old clothes, and a good night's rest to get up and go tomorrow! Can’t wait to see what’s in store for us! Thanks for praying!
-Felicia