Well, we’ve made it back to Honduras, regrettably uneventfully… An uneventful travel is only regrettable when one wishes to write a blog about it! Otherwise, uneventful = great! It was a long journey, but a remarkably smooth one. After a good month in Canada, visiting family and friends, working, and attending a wedding, we were ready to come back to Honduras. Truth be told, in some ways it’ll never be “easy". Victoria is a beautiful place, especially in summer, and there’s never enough time to do what you want to do. I could spend a lifetime on my dear island and never get to do it all! Much less a measly month in a busy summer. Nevertheless, I’ll take what I can get.

Last Tuesday morning began with a tearful farewell at the Black Ball Ferry building in downtown Victoria with my parents and sister. Alanna did all the crying. Haha, just kidding! Paid our fare, cleared customs, and left our thousand bags on the courtesy cart so we could board and spend the next while waving to my parents and sister waiting by the inner harbour. The voyage out of the inner harbour is quite a nice one, trying to imagine how the early settlers must have seen those rocky outcroppings full of trees and much fewer buildings. Not to mention how the native peoples must have been impressed by the beauty before any settlers came. We chased a seaplane out as we went, no doubt as many canoes had done hundreds of years before, and everyone oohed and awed as that bucket of bolts somehow managed to leave the water and enter the air. I still think it’s one of man’s greatest achievements: getting a heavy piece of machinery aloft.

It was smooth sailing across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which I found out is roughly the same distance as the length (north to south) of the Sea of Galilee in Israel, which helps put some Bible stories into better perspective. I even got to practice a little German on board as I tried to converse with an older German woman briefly as I bought a coffee. Of course that mostly consists of me saying my grandmother is German and that my father was born there. Simply captivating storytelling! Anyways, then I tried to help her understand the amount she had to pay at the cashier.

It’s funny how the United States is the only country you enter twice. We passed customs in Victoria, then again in Port Angeles on the other side. I find thought that crossing by boat is still the easiest and most pain-free. We stumbled the short few blocks to the bus stop from the ferry to board the bus to the airport. It’s actually a fairly easy way to get there. Whereas the Clipper costs over $100 USD per person just to get to downtown Seattle, the Coho and bus (called the Dungeness line…so from salmon to crab…) altogether for the 2 of us was $135 USD. However, being accustomed to Honduran buses, I found this one quite uncomfortable! Yes, you read that right: I am used to Honduran buses, and this one in the USA I thought was uncomfortable. First, you have to wear a seatbelt, and you’re on a seat designed for a city bus. So I had one butt cheek on the seatbelt…not comfortable. How much less so for those wider than me! Then, since it was a bus that could accommodate wheelchairs, my foot space was impeded by the anchors for a wheelchair. Nevertheless, it was a scenic ride including a half hour ferry ride, and unlike in Honduras, no one threw their garbage out the window! On ferries, I definitely prefer Washington State ferries over BC Ferries any day. For one, it’s not a wannabe cruise ship. Secondly, you can walk around anywhere on the decks! BC Ferries confines you so you stay inside and buy things. Nein, danke. Yet their still very clean and functional.

The bus drops you off right at departures at SeaTac airport, but we had six hours before our flight, so our friend Steve came and met us. We decided to go out for dinner. There’s many options at SeaTac, an airport I really like, but we went to the nearby Southcenter Mall for a bite at Bahama Breeze, for one last plate of delicious onion rings! Back at the airport we had to readjust our bags so they were at or below the 50-pound maximum. Three bags were bang on 50! The other was less because it was a smaller one, but we still had to gift a bottle of cider so we could fit it all. Our first flight was a red-eye to Houston, where we had a good amount of time to get to our next gate. A rather uneventful flight brought us here to Honduras. There was threat of turbulence along the Mexican coast, but wasn’t too bad. Entering the country was fun, because this time we got to go in the Residents/Citizens line! Got some funny looks for people, but it was a quicker line than for the foreigners.

Back in Honduras we took a taxi from the airport the short 15 minutes to the bus depot. The bus is about half the price of the taxi ride and yet about 12 times the distance! Kinda crazy really. One of the bus guys was a bit whiny about how many bags we had, but I didn’t feel too bad. We were among the few who had luggage, so too bad for him. I kinda got the feeling he was maybe one of the few people trying to take advantage of us being gringos. I find that quite rare here, but it can happen. Anyways, I gave him a few bucks, but I’m not sure he was too happy still. Welcome to life, my friend. Usually the bus guys are super helpful and accommodating, so I’m not sure why this guy had a bee in his bonnet. It threatened rain much of the drive, but happily our bags stayed dry! Back in Santa Rosa we needed another taxi. Much cheaper fare than San Pedro. The guy had our stuff precariously packed into his trunk and I tried to ignore the fact it could fall out at any moment!

We got home and said our hellos, and managed to get ourselves decent enough to go to the meeting that night at the Kingdom Hall! We were late nevertheless…we arrived to our house only an hour before it was to start, so I guess it’s understandable. What I love about Honduras is the welcome you get. All in the congregation are so welcoming and warm, it’s very encouraging! But there’s also the welcome the country itself gives you. For example I had a class to teach online the next morning. Alright! So I log in, meet my student, and just as I’m about to start, the power goes out. GRRRRR!!! Thanks, Honduras. Haha! I guess that has more to do with tech than a country, but it’s still frustrating. I had bought a battery backup, but it’s the worst design ever! If there’s not enough connected to it, it shuts down automatically after five minutes. Are you kidding me? I have it to EXTEND my time, not lessen it cluttering it with more electronics connected to drain it faster! Oh, and it beeps like every minute…Gooooood mooooorning, Shelagh!! I have an internet stick for backup, a USB modem. Of course that wouldn’t work for me either. So that was terrific. Since then, the power had gone out several times, but I managed. It had been going out much more regularly than I remember from before. Seems to have stabilized a little now...

So we’ve gotten right back to things, keeping busy in the congregation. We don’t start work at the school again until tomorrow afternoon. This week we have the visit of the circuit overseer and his wife, so it will be an encouraging week for us, and we hope for them too! We brought back some Chocolate Chili Chai tea from David’s Tea for them, so we hope they like it. People back home have been so generous with us, we are trying to copy that fine example! We have brought many things down here over the years, some of which we haven’t used to the extent we thought, so we are trying to find people who can benefit from those things. So far we’ve had some success, and it feels good to downsize some more. It’s full-fledged hurricane/rainy season here, so weather has been all over the place. A little sun, a little rain, a little thunder and lightning. No official hurricanes nearby, but that could change. Hopefully things remain fairly uneventful…in a good way, nonetheless I will try to keep this blog updated more frequently. Thanks for reading! Auf wiedersehen!