Kansas Road Trip!

We are blessed to have met a man named Brian Maydew back in 2010. Brian is a normal man, with a normal job, who does something a little abnormal - every year, he ships containers to Zambia filled with things for nonprofit organizations - schools, clinics, and churches. He has so graciously offered to ship items to New Day - he ships all of our prosthetic team's supplies, he shipped a trailer for us last year, and he has GIVEN New Day two of the 40 foot containers! Every furlough, we drive up to Kansas (Lebanon, Kansas, about 7 miles south of the Nebraska border) and load up the Maydews' barn. Then, our stuff arrives at New Day about 4-6 months later! This year, Brian also agreed to let my parents put some of their personal housing supplies on the container for their move to Zambia, so along with that and all of the solar equipment we purchased, we had quite the load!

Road trip - here we come! Day 1 we drove to Concordia, Kansas, which took us about 12 hours. I rode with Blu & my mom in a truck pulling a U-Haul.

We learned pretty quickly that Mom needs her coffee to survive!

And a to-go coffee at lunch!

I need a cappuccino of course!!

Meanwhile, my dad and Blu's dad drove Paw's truck pulling his trailer. (Due to the weight of the solar equipment, we had to split the stuff into 2 loads.)

We got to Concordia (our truck arrived first, by about an hour, but that's another story....), ate some barbecue (because that's what you eat in Kansas, right???), and headed to our hotel. A man in Dad's church used his award points to book us 3 rooms for free - blessings all along the way!

Early the next morning, we got up and drove the remaining 1.5 hours to Lebanon. I'm telling you, this place is more rural than Mapanza!!! It is the geographical center of the USA, with tiny roads that we drove up and down, and up and down, as we tried to find the turn. Oops. Nebraska sign. We went too far!

This is Blu's mad face - it was a frustrating few minutes!

Meanwhile, we put on our "warm" clothes! It was 25 degrees!

Once we got there, we all converged on the barn to organize the boxes already there onto pallets and prepare for our own unloading.

Three hours later, we were done! The barn is full, and we'll see our stuff on the other side of the ocean! We left the barn in our rearview mirror and drove home to Brownwood, arriving at 12:47am!

Meanwhile, back at New Day, haircut time for the boys!

We head back to New Day one month from tomorrow, and now that the Kansas trip is behind us, I can feel myself getting ready - I'm getting in packing mode and ready to start wrapping things up here! All we have left is a ballet recital, three speaking engagements, a few weeknight dinner dates, and Christmas with our families!