Homecoming

The last few days of our journey didn't exactly work out as we expected. Friday was a somewhat discouraging day where I felt that we didn't accomplish very much. I was beginning to feel that maybe the trip was a day or two too long.

Saturday turned out much better than we anticipated. We had a very productive visit at the Orange Walk Presbyterian School and even met a group of students from Vanderbilt who were working there.

We spent Saturday afternoon visiting the spectacular Mayan ruins at Lamanai and even got a bit lost on the way back. Perhaps that was a foreshadowing of things to come. As we were relaxing over breakfast before church on Sunday, Chuck's phone rang and Dale informed him that our flights home had been canceled. Soon after Delta called to tell him the same thing. We scurried to the airport where Pat found an alternative set of connections back to Wyoming. We got a flight back to Charlotte where we planned to rent a car to drive home. You can see from the picture how that worked out. After a white-knuckle hour to drive twenty miles, we pulled off and spent another night on the road in a hotel north of Charlotte. The drive was a still a little slow going early Monday morning but roads eventually improved and we were rewarded with a gorgeous winter wonderland drive through the mountains on the way back to Knoxville.

As I said, things didn't always work out as we planned. At times when prospects looked the most pessimistic we achieved breakthroughs that gave us hope for the future. Then when we got feeling pretty good about ourselves, we made decisions that looked good at the time but may not have been any better than doing nothing at all.

The Lord surely does work in His own time and in mysterious ways.

Peace and farewell until we return to Belize in April,
Dave