The Adventure Continues!

I apologize that I’m not very responsible with keeping up with blogging. It just doesn’t really make sense to me to pause life so that I can sit down and write about life. I’ll try to keep you updated more often now that we’re on the road; I’m sorry if I lead any of you to believe that I just fell off the face of the earth.

Project ended about a week ago. We debriefed in Munich for about three days and I had to say my goodbyes to the best team of all time before they went to catch the train to the airport. I am so thankful that God chose each of us to do ministry together in Sweden. He did amazing things during that time, both in the Swedes and in us. He is truly moving there; He constantly put members of our team in the paths of hungry people, lead us to friendships and good conversation, but most importantly provided us opportunities to share the gospel with people who had never heard it before. No one accepted Christ as their Savior during our time there, but we know for certain that many are steps closer than they were. It’s amazing to me how quickly our love for these people grew, and I know that we will all continue praying for Sweden for the rest of our lives; I hope you’ll join us.

James came to pick me up in our Fiat a few minutes before my team left. I have to admit that I was worried about being stranded in Munich if he didn’t show up. I didn’t get a message saying he’d made his flight like we’d planned, and the internet in the hostel was bad so it was hard to look up his flight. I was pretty worried, but God took good care of him and brought him safely to the hostel in the nick of time. If anyone reading this knows James’ dad, you need to thank him for letting him take almost of month off of work so that he could fly to Europe and hang out with me. I don’t know where the heck I’d be right now without him.

We left from Munich to Heidelberg, another absolutely beautiful town in Germany that has a big castle and a really quaint “old town” . We just walked around and enjoyed the scenery for the most part. We explored the castle and a famous trail called “Philosopher’s Way” that supposedly has inspired many great minds in history. We didn’t get that inspired, mostly just lost, but it was really fun and just a relaxing day. Our hostel was run by a sweet family with a cute little boy, and we roomed with two Canadians (that made James very happy). I’m sad that we were only spent one night there, but the next day was a pretty big adventure.

So we left Heidleberg in the early afternoon, in hopes of getting to Prague around 6 or 7. That didn’t happen. That didn’t even come close to happening. I’m not really sure how to explain this without sounding like a complete idiot, but I’ll put my pride aside just this once so that you can fully enjoy this story. When I’m in South Carolina, I set my GPS to avoid toll roads because I live close to one and it always sends me that way. I forgot that this avoidance was in effect, so we set off toward the Czech Republic with an ETA of around 10pm (we weren’t sure why it was going to take so long, but we just blindly followed the GPS). So a couple of hours in to the trip, we’re in the CR on a dirt road that’s about a meter and a half wide, lined with trees and random little villages. We’d go about 6 or 7 kilometers before it would tell us to turn onto another completely ridiculous back road in the middle of NOWHERE.
We did, however, see some very interesting things:
-James is not a country boy, and thought the hay bales covered in white tarps were sheep and he got really excited.
-We were talking about how similar some of the fields with cows and barns were to the ones back in Carolina and I said “All they’re missing is a John Deere”… Low and behold we come across a John Deere store. In the middle of NO WHERE in the CR. Ridiculous.
-We saw a beautiful sunset, pulled over to take pictures…and a car came down the road in the opposite direction we’d be driving. That was how we discovered it was actually a TWO lane road somehow. Good thing it just so happened to cross our path when we were pulled over—not sure how we would have both fit on that little tree lined road.

Eventually I got to thinking about all the settings my GPS is capable of… and then I realized why exactly we were on a dirt road with no street signs outside a 10 house village in the Czech Republic… because they use toll roads for pretty much everything. Awesome.

Haha, actually, it was a pretty fun mistake and I’m glad we did it. We’re actually probably going to continue taking as many scenic routes as possible while we’re traveling.

A fun day/evening of travel turned out to be pretty terrifying. We finally made it to Prague around 11pm and the address the hostel had provided us was incorrect, so we drove/walked around some sketchy part of Prague for half an hour looking for it. I even got out my laptop and looked for the hostel’s wireless to see if we could find it that way haha. We eventually find it, thanks to a few people walking their dogs in the middle of the night, and we park our car and go to the door. It’s locked, but they’re supposed to have 24 hour reception so we continue to ring the doorbell for quite some time. Finally, a girl comes out from behind a curtain and starts stumbling to the door. She is obviously completely wasted. She let’s us in and tells us we’re in room 8 and just to pay in the morning. She gives us the key and goes back behind the curtain.

The hallway is pitch dark and there isn’t a sound at all. We use James’ phone to light each of the doors to find our number. It’s on the very end of the hall. We open the door and walk in—still eerily silent considering we were supposed to be in a room with lots of other people—there are 4 single beds, none of which are occupied, and each couple of beds are pushed together. The place is just downright CREEPY. And then… we notice two brown hand prints halfway down the wall. They weren’t made by someone standing up, it appeared more like they were from someone falling down… and I can’t describe it as anything other than blood. That is what it was. I am sure of it. At this point, I was pretty terrified and James was really uneasy about the place too, but it was late and we decided to go get our luggage out of the car. We go to the door. She’d locked us in. (holy crap! I was beyond scared at this point). She’d disappeared behind the curtain again and I didn’t want to try and find her, so we tried to find another way out of the hostel. We found some open windows in the bathroom…but it was a 20 foot drop. The locked door was the only door to the entire place. Y’all—this place was something out of the Shining or some equally scary horror movie—it was decorated in ridiculously weird pictures of like sad puppies and old people. And I am almost certain that there was no one else staying there. We sat in our room for a minute and tried to figure out a game plan. We decided that staying there would end up in certain death for both of us, maybe torture too, so we went back to find the drunk receptionist. We rang the bell for a while before she stumbled out again, she seemed confused about why we wanted to leave—but she let us out and that’s all that mattered to me. I didn’t care if we slept in the car or something—we would have surely died if we stayed there.

So, we were in the shady part of Prague, in the middle of the night, with nowhere to stay.

That concludes this blog. Haha, sorry… I promise to finish telling our epic story as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

I hope you’re all doing very well and that your summers are just as adventure-filled as mine. I can’t wait to hear about them!

Your sister in Christ,
Mindy