WE Conference 2013

Every three years our mission has a conference for all of their Western European workers.  It is always a highly anticipated event for our family as it takes us new places and provides a week long experience meant for our encouragement, refreshment and fellowship with our extended family throughout Europe.    This year we traveled to Madeira--an island off the west coast of Africa that belongs to Portugal.  The conference is always held the week of Thanksgiving, which is nice, but honestly our traditional celebrations of the holiday are missed as we are at the mercy of whatever the hotel prepares for our feast day.  Turkey was present at least and the paper pumpkins on the tables were a nice touch.

We had a rough start to our trip as Samuel was so excited about leaving that he could not sleep the night before we left.  He might have slept 2 hours before he woke up at midnight saying he felt hungry and couldn't sleep.  After several calls for Mamma every ten minutes I brought him down to the living room and let him turn on a movie.  Then he got sick repeatedly making me nervous that he contracted a flu bug and we would have to fly with a sick and tired child.  Once dawn arrived he was doing much better and we concluded he was just overly excited.

We left our house early Sunday morning to drive to Milan to catch a noon flight out from there.  When we arrived in Lisbon the passport control workers were on strike which caused us to miss our connecting flight.  We were really confused about having to go through passport control since we were not leaving the EU, but apparently the flight we were booked on was actually going on to Venezuela after a stopover in Madeira.  The next available flight for us to get rebooked on was 7 hours later.  Thus we spent basically the whole day in the airport.  The ONE consolation was that there was a Starbucks!  Samuel actually fell asleep there for maybe an hour.  We finally arrived at the hotel around 11:30pm, which was 12:30am Italy time.  It took us longer to get to Madeira than it would have been to go to the USA.

Thankfully the conference didn't start until Monday night and we had the day to sleep in and relax a bit.  We took a walk to the center of town since we were told it was just 25 minutes on foot.  We are used to walking a lot and rather quickly too, but it turned out to be more like an hour walk. The kids were not all that happy about our long excursion but getting gelato, finding a park along the way and the promise of going swimming in the pool upon our return to the hotel kept them moving.  The island is absolutely beautiful and nothing is more reenergizing than breathing in ocean air!

The conference was a tremendous blessing to us in so many ways through the worship, speakers and interaction with others.  We truly came away refreshed spiritually and emotionally, even though not so much physically.  Our kids were loved upon and treated to a week of hanging out with other MK's and participating in a VBS type program both in the mornings and evenings.  They got in the pool twice in less than ideal weather conditions, but when you're young like that those are just tiny details.  The kids are really excited to be "pen-pal-ing" with the friends they made via email.  Too bad these conferences are only every three years.

I have been wanting to get this post up for two weeks now, but had some technical difficulties with the slideshow.  For those who have been waiting to see pictures, thanks for your patience!