On our way!

Pack up, say goodbyes, and leave Dallas, TX - Completed

Spend a week with the McNeil family in Colorado - Completed Fly from Denver to London - Completed Spend a week in Swindon with the Mann family - In Process Fly from London to Singapore (13 hours!!) - Overnight in Singapore - Fly to Semarang, Indonesia (2 hours) - Drive an hour from Semarang to Salatiga!! We are in the middle of all of our travel plans right now. Tonight we say goodbye to the Mann family, and on Wednesday evening we begin our major flight across the world. It's all happening! It's a bit surreal to be in the middle of it because it feels strikingly normal. We have traveled to Denver and to England to see family pretty regularly, and being in transition has been just about our entire lives! It's strange to feel quite at peace and comfortable when we expect to feel chaotic. The other strange thing is goodbyes. They are tough, especially for Kacie, and leaving for four years makes for a long seperation from family. And yet these goodbyes have been really eased by our long wait for visas, support, and surgery. With each delay our longing to GO and to get started with what we feel called to has only increased, and now we feel such joy and excitement to be going! Kacie's mom accurately compared it to getting married. We know that this adventure will be wonderful, but it will also come with times of pain and difficulty that it's probably better that we can't forsee. At some point, though, there's not much more you can do to prepare. You just enter it with joy and begin the journey! So, here we are. We're beginning the journey with excitement and joy. In the next few days please pray for Elly, who has been a bit under the weather. Pray that both of our kids would be miraculously quiet and well-behaved on the long flight, and that those around us would be patient with us! On our flight to England the lady in front of us requested at the beginning of the flight that we "keep the kids quiet, because, you know, we paid for this flight too." At the end she admitted our kids had been "angelic", and we could do with a repeat performance of that! A final huge praise is that our co-workers in Indonesia have been able to rent a furnished home for us just 10 minutes from the language school at a great price. This will ease our transition and we are so excited to get there! We are located just across the street from a mosque, so we expect to get used to hearing the call to prayer early every morning. These are some of the same things Kacie remembers from her move to Indonesia when she was a child.