Our Journey to Kona

Kate and Abi

We have arrived and already have some pretty incredible stories to tell. We had a great week seeing friends and family in Cornwall and our leaving party at Grace Community Church was a really good time, we were joined in it by our friend Katherine Gillespie who is also studying DTS at the University of the Nations here in Kona and our other friend Danny O’Rourke who is studying Korean in Seoul. On Sunday we headed to London with great anticipation for what was before us. Our flight was on tuesday, so we stayed with our good friend Kate Harkus in London on Monday and enjoyed some great mexican food near covent Garden.

Finally, after over 12 months of anticipation and planning we boarded our plane in London Heathrow on Tuesday at 11am, this is really where our adventures began! Once onboard the plane we were getting ready to spend 11hrs stuck on a plane (which is certainly not Rachel’s favourite pastime) to fly to San Francisco, when we were notified from the cockpit that a nav system in the plane had gone wrong and had to be replaced! I won’t bore you with too much detail except to say 4 hours later we had watched 1 and 1/2 movies and the replacement hadn’t worked and people had started to become a little uneasy.

During this time there had also been an announcement that because of the legality of extended working times, the flight would now have to divert to Chicago because the crew couldn’t work as long as a flight to San Francisco, which would mean another serious extension on the flight time meaning we would certainly miss our connecting flight in San Francisco.

United Airlines

Fast forward 15hrs and we arrived at Chicago, fortunately we did not have to get off the plane, but the new crew came onboard along with as much food and drinks as they could carry. The layover was not received well by certain passengers, a 90 year old man sitting near us who was suffering with dementia just couldn’t stay on the flight any longer had to be escorted off to fly the next time, and another, seemingly unstable and agitated passenger decided to call 911 and declare that the plane had been hi-jacked by the crew and he wanted to go to San Francisco. A few minuites later US Security boarded the plane and removed him. We were later told that he had be taken to jail and fined $10,000!

The Adventure was not over yet, our plane took off for another 4hrs and we landed in San Francisco, this was the most nerve-wracking part of our journey as we had to clear immigration, which we were warned may be a problem due to our earlier refusal for a visa. As we lined up for immigration, with about 24hrs since our last sleep and 18hrs on our supposedly 11hr flight we not in the best shape to answer important questions. As approached the immigration desk  I tried for my best smile and things seemed to be going well, finally our immigration officer said to us: “I’m afraid I’m going to have to send you for some secondary questioning”, our hearts sunk as we walked along the corridor to a holding area and we began to pray as we were able to.

In the holding room we were called up to a desk to a particularly stern looking Japanese-American officer who took the next hour looking through our

Passport

documents and asking us questions. There was not one positive sign from him during our whole time, until finally I said “What should I bring to make this process smoother in the future” and he said “Just make sure you always tell the truth like you have this time” and stamped our passports giving us 3 months to be inside the US! We later found out our friend and school leader Jeff Reid has been praying for immigration in particular during that time.

Once we were past immigration we planned to pick up our bags and go see our airline desk to see about getting  hotel and flights for the next day, but unfortuntely the bags had got mixed up and we spent the next 3hrs going around the airport and speaking to different United desks about finding it. At this point it was about midnight in San Francisco and we’d been on the go for more than 24hrs, but finally Rachel’s bag had turned up, though it was a hardcase and had been broken.

Too tired to be bothered, we jumped on the shuttle bus for our unexpected one night stop in San Francisco, neither of us slept much more than 3hrs, we got back on a shuttle at 6am for the airport for our 9am flight, one small mercy in all of this was that instead of our scheduled San Francisco to Kona via Honolulu flights we were changed to a direct Kona flight.

Once on the flight, after a questionable mexican breakfast, we met Silvia a finnish girl who was going on our DTS, and then met a whole family of norwegians who were also coming to YWAM in Kona but on a different DTS, it made us miss Emelie and the Malmqvists but it was interesting to hear their story of how they came to YWAM.

Once we landed in Kona we stept off the plane and were met by our great friends Johnny and Jenni Gillespie who had traditional Hawaiian lei’s for us. We then had a sweaty car journey, tired, but happy to be in Hawaii back to our school leaders and good friends house Jeff and Bethany Reid.

Jeff and Bethany Reid's kitchen

More updates to come soon!