Portland

After about 37 hours of travelling I finally made it to Portland on Wednesday night and was picked up by Nadia. It was so great to see her - after sharing a room with someone for 10 weeks you kinda miss them when you're apart for a whole month :) I'm staying with her family and they're just amazing. A home cooked meal when I arrived home with a couple of hours of catching up with Nadia over green tea and Hershey's kisses (chocolates) and I was so beyond ready for bed...

Thursday Nadia blessed me with an amazing day out checking out the sights of Portland. Even if for the longest time I thought "she's going to kill me with her driving!" No, her driving is perfect, it's just that we're driving on the wrong side of the road to what I'm used to - I spend a lot of the time thinking we're going to drive straight in a car! Ha ha, Nadia thinks I'm amusing.

Portland is a beautiful city. We started with a leisurely breakfast at home with her parents and then headed off to town with first stop being Lush (a soap store) to stock me up with skin products - so in a few days/weeks I may in the dirt in the jungle but at least I'm going to have great skin and smell good! Let's hope I'll have enough water to enjoy these soaps... :) Lunch was on the 30th floor of a building at a great restaurant where we looked out over the city, followed my dessert at Urban Farmers, a great hotel in town. So we really did live it up enjoying the luxury of city life before I head out... oh and what would a trip to America be without stopping at Starbucks for a vanilla latter :)

Danike, another friend from Harvest School in Mozambique, came over for a braai (barbeque) in the evening along with Breck Boyd, and Jesse, Tanya and Zoe Gellatly (also from Harvest School). It was the beginning of meeting up with the team going South America. I met 3 other girls who will also be joining us. Nadia's parents cooked up an amazing feast for us, we all enjoyed it knowing that it's better than the rice and beans we have to look forward to in South America. Zoe (21 months old) had different ideas when her opening line at dinner was "where's rice and beans? I want rice and beans." You can tell she's grown up in Mozambique!! It was so great seeing other Harvest School friends again, we're pretty amped to get going!

Today we head down to Redding California where we'll be attending a revival meeting at Bethel Church. Yay. Also exciting is that I just found out Heidi Baker will be there. Awesome. I miss her. She'll be preaching at Bethel on Sunday but we will be leaving on Saturday so that's sad we'll miss out, but I'm sure we'll have a lot of fun wherever we are by then.

I wasn't ready to say to goodbye to Nadia (I've had too many emotional goodbyes saying goodbye to friends and family this week!) so I suggested she come to Redding for the weekend, so she is! With Danike and another of her friends Roman. This was decided over dinner last night so we'll be roadtripping to Redding today, and tomorrow I'll say goodbye before I'll leave with the SA team.

So far I'm loving America and am ready and excited to be headed out on the trip. I can confirm however that jetlag sucks. 4am this morning and wide awake. Considering I was falling asleep at the dinner table at 8pm last night, and only got to bed about 11pm, this is not looking good. This could be a long day ahead as Redding is about 8 hours away apparently. Hmm. Lucky I'm not driving! The good thing is that it's giving me time to write this blog before I have to get packed!