Wednesday, June 22, 2016

France: Day 1


Bonjour!

We made it safely to France on Tuesday, June 21st, after almost 23 hours of travel.  We left Norfolk via Amtrak shuttle bus at 7:40am and were dropped off at the Amtrak station in Newport News.  We boarded the train at 9:15 and then traveled laboriously up to Union Station in Washington DC, where we barely made our Super Shuttle pick-up at 2:05pm. Two more minutes and he would have left us to figure something else out.  We then worked our way across downtown DC to pick up another couple before we could finally head towards Dulles airport and our plane.  The van was quite the experience as every few minutes the air would stop working and the heat would start.  It made for some miserable 50+ minutes.  We arrived at Dulles almost 30 minutes behind what we should have been and the check-in was time consuming but when we printed out our boarding passes; well that's when the Lord truly smiled upon us because we all had TSA Pre and the line was almost completely empty!!  Praise Jesus!  Our flight was fairly uneventful, small pockets of turbulence but nothing major.  We arrived in Paris on time and to clouds and rain.  We stayed inside the airport and waited over 3 hours to take an almost 2 hour train ride to St. Pierre de Corps.  The train was amazing.  Extremely quiet and very fast.  I mean, very fast! It was like nothing I had ever been on before.  We were met by George and Sheryl who then drove us another 1 1/2 hours to the towns of Buzancais (bu•zan•say) & Souge (sue•jay).  The jewelry store that they are converting into a place of Worship is in Buzancais, and the farmhouse is in Souge.  We had some time of prayer in both places and then headed to bed.  Wednesday we woke to a beautiful, warm day and enjoyed eating our breakfast outside, were we enjoyed fresh French pastries.  Can you say YUM!  We then divided up into 3 teams:  Barry, Arnold, and George to the store to do electrical work; Jamie, Sheryl, and I to the store to clean out some cobwebs; Juli and Emma stayed at the farmhouse and put together the goodie bags that we will give to the women that attend the fellowship Friday evening.  Until tomorrow...........Au revior

France Team
Emma, Barry, Arnold, Juli, Dorie, and Jamie