Jenna b. Photography: El Salvador: day 1

(As I finish each day's worth of photos, I’m going to post my journal entry for that day when we were in El Salvador. there were only 8 days, so no need to worry about this being a super long process… and hopefully you’ll like the photos too. all 2000 of them. ;) [hehe, no worries, I won’t post them ALL on here.])

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Day 1: lunch of burger king; supper of chick-fil-a sandwich (basically trying to get as much American-style food as possible before we left).

We left the church building at 9:30. Lucky for me, I got to ride squished in the back of a SUPER hot van with my parents… just kidding. It wasn’t that bad. My parents are awesome. :) But in sitting there, I got to sit right behind our song leader and so we sang the entire 4 hour ride to the ATL airport. My jaws got really sore, but so worth it.

Made it to the airport by 3:30 and had to wait until 4 to check all of our bags in… which took probably another hour or so. Mom’s passport was having problems and it wasn’t scanning right… but then they figured it out and all was well. James was in front of me and had a nice long conversation with the ticket-guy about flying… then he proceeded to write “first-timer” on James’ ticket. Needless to say, James was thrilled. :P The man who checked my luggage and gave me my boarding pass (Leland), was the same man who checked me in last year… and he said he remembered me! He was probably just being nice, but there’s just something about someone you don’t know say “may God bless your trip, Jenna!”

But back to our flight... or what should have been our flight. Our 7 o’clock flight got delayed until 9, so we got to spend a total of over 5 hours in the ATL airport. The first of many hours in airports over the next week. :P We played mafia for a while, wandered all over the airport trying to find chick-fil-a… all the while explaining to the first-time fliers (James, Emma, Daniel S., and Keegan) how airports worked.

The flights went smoothly… other than the fact that the delay of our first flight nearly made us miss our connecting flight. Luckily, though, we made it just at the “final call” for admission. The young girl sitting behind me on the first flight was on her 8^th birthday. And Laura C. decided it would be AWESOME to sing happy birthday to her. So basically, the entire plane sang happy birthday to her… let’s just say, we certainly know how to make a scene. :)

We were met at the airport by familiar faces from last year. Warner, Enrique, Alejandro, and a few others. The 2-hour drive to Santa Ana started out hot, but towards the end when we all started to wake back up, we were all frozen to our seats. (well, not exactly frozen, but when you have very cold wind blowing at you from all directions from the open windows in the school bus… you get the point. It was cold.)

When we arrived at Hotel Tolteka, we all ran up to our rooms, unpacked as fast as possible, and hit the hay. Estimated time of going to sleep? 3:30am.

The group.