Saturday, July 18 – Jerod and I said our good-bye’s to Lil’ Miss K (so hard!) and left her in the very capable hands of my mom, while my dad dropped us off at the airport late morning. We met up with our group, checked in to our American Airlines flight, and left Kansas City around 1.

We had a quick 1-hour layover in Dallas, but it proved to be plenty of time to get to our connection. The flights were smooth until we got to Nicaragua, where a storm was passing through. Our seatbacks had screens with a flight map – so after a lot of turbulence and elevation loss and gain, we could see that our plane was going out into the ocean rather than landing in Managua. Come to find out, it was doing a loop to avoid the storm. Upon heading back to the city, we did three more loops before finally landing. I know at least one person had to use his airsick bag – it was definitely a rough 45 minutes.

Customs was similar to any other airport, except we had to pay a $10 entry fee to get into Nicaragua. Nicas picked up our luggage and transported them to the exit for us for a $1 tip. Because we got in late, we didn’t have time for Eddie, our bus driver, to drop us off at basecamp and get back to pick up the next group of missionaries, so we waited at the airport for what seemed like eternity. We finally got to basecamp around 10:30 (11:30 Kansas City time). We had a very quick meeting, then we finally got to eat cold pizza for dinner. We found our room assignments and tip-toed around to get settled, as an earlier group had already gone to bed. I was in a room with 3 other women (the room had 8 beds), and Jerod got to bunk in a large room with 14 other guys. But overall, the accommodations were extremely nice for being in a 3rd world country. We didn’t exactly have to “rough it” like my previous mission trip to Haiti. It was a long first day, and I went to bed excited for the next day!