GOOD BYE AMERICA!

Leaving America:

I left Maui on a night flight with my four huge storage bins all overweight and my two small carryon items that included all my personal things for three weeks!! The airline was so sweet to only charge me half for ALL my overweight luggage when they heard what I was doing :) I've never packed that little amount for even a week trip! On the flight from Maui, I was awoken at an early hour in the morning by an overhead panic announcemnt asking any medical personel to please report to the back of the airplane and I of course jumped up and ran to a passed out woman in the bathroom! Needless to say, she was ok and I monitored her until we landed about 2 hours later when paramedics took over -- talk about a begining to this trip!!!  I was greeted in Portland by blistery freezing cold temps and a huge snow storm that Portland rarely sees! A dear friend picked me and all of my bins up and we had a delicious breakfast which was my last big yummy breakfast for a long while! I met up with some members of my team at the storage house and we organized and packed and re packed a bunch of bins!!! Listening to the women talk about the needs and deciding what was needed and what gifts would be treasured excited me and made me jealous that they have all been there and on trips like this in the past and I couldn't wait to experience it all firsthand! One woman asked me how many trips I had been on and when my reply was never, she looked at me intensenly and said, "write this down in your journal Kandice, because life is completely changed forever after tomorrow" ~ and she couldn't have spoken more of the truth! I took the longest hot bath in my hotel that night by myself and ate dinner alone with a yummy beer at the hotel and watched the olympics all while freezing my Maui butt off!!

FROZEN IN PORTLAND!!!!

I fit all that MY personal stuff into 2 tiny bags!

dear friend Brian who lugged me all around the snow!