*Can we all give a round of applause to my Papa, who subscribed to my blog via email and was able to send me all of the originals of the “lost blog posts”?*

Another week has passed!

And you want to hear something crazy? I am a fourth of the way through this assignment.

Even after having done this three times before, I still have not gotten used to how quickly time flies while doing these. It doesn’t feel it as one goes through the day by day, but when a moment is taken to step back and “zoom out”, time’s passage is evident.

This week, I decided to give driving to work a go. While it’s true that I get to leave for work later (7:10), I’m not really waking up any later, since instead of doing my Bible reading on the ride in on the Metro, I’m doing it beforehand at home. Traffic isn’t horrific (as I’m driving in the opposite direction of most people), but it isn’t a hope, skip, and a jump either (~45-ish minutes). I’m thinking I’ll switch between the two, as I see fit.

On the drive in on Monday, I decided to see if there were any doughnut places on my way in. There were! While they were no straight-off-the-conveyor-belt, Krispy Kreme doughnut, the doughnut I had (Nutella S’more) now sits in my top five! Gourmet AND good!

On Tuesday, I got this text from Carly. While I find it fun to learn from friends who are interested in different things than me, there is something special about those friends which we share much in common. Carly’s friendship is one of those. The question to having an LOTR watch night is not “if”, but “when and where”.

The rest of the week didn’t have much excitement, but it was probably best since the weekend and half of the next week is chock full of it! You see, after months of awaiting this trip, it has finally arrived: we are in Washington STATE!

At the end of March, SEARCH hosted a weekend conference, which two guys came from Washington (state) to speak at. They made such an impression on my friends, Rachel and Codie, that they wanted to come visit Mike and his family for more time with them. When they got something on the calendar, they were sweet enough to invite me and a couple peeps to come along for the ride! Of course, I said yes!

I drove Friday straight from work to Rio. Then, on Saturday, I enjoyed the morning of visiting with several women and getting my local coffee fix before we hit the road that afternoon to drive to Cincinnati, to then fly out to Seattle that evening!

I didn’t share the row with anyone from our crew, so I got to finish my Sherlock Holmes read, “The Sign of Four”. Afterwards, I put in my headphones and jammed out as I watched the beautiful, changing terrain below. I realized at the airport that the last time I was on a flight was when I was coming home from Israel, in June 2019, two years ago this month!

If you’ve ever traveled west before, you probably understand the strangeness of the experience. How the sun seems to hang in the sky, as if waiting for you to arrive before continuing on its course.

At one point, I was struck by the “fields” of clouds that lay out my window.

My adult head knew that they are water vapor clinging to dust particles, but my child heart imagined skipping across them, sticking my tongue to taste the cotton-candy-laden air and allow the sugar to melt onto it. As we descended through the clouds, the urge to reach out and let my fingers touch them, whether water or sugar, was felt.

The first sight of the ground below jarred me back reality and shook me out of my fantastical, whimsical musings. The endless sky was replaced with the boundaries of cities, the curves of the clouds with the blocking of streets and buildings. However, I was eager for what awaited me on the ground below, so I recovered quickly.

There’s a three hour time difference between Rio/DC and Washington, so by the time we landed and got to our final destination, it was 2 AM Rio/DC time. It was a lot of traveling in a short amount of time, but I felt energized and ready for what lay before me!

So far, we’ve gotten to have lunch at a local pizza place, skip rocks on the Puget Sound (a competition ensued, which I did not win), a shopping trip to REI, and getting to join in on a group that gets together weekly. I particularly enjoyed the last because I loved meeting the new people and hearing their life stories, how God has worked in their lives, and hearing/seeing what bringing God into the day-to-day looks like for them!

I’ll share with you all what lays in store today (I’m writing this this morning), Tuesday, and Wednesday in the next post!