We survived the night, but the tent didn't survive the day.

We woke up two nights ago to our tent caving in on us. The wind was quite strong and our tent wasn't shielded. Kristin and i were sharing her tent. After restocking two corners at least twice, all of a sudden we heard "Snap". One of our support arches didn't survive. We went out side to see the damage: it wasn't good. However, a structural fix was do-able. Mike also woke up from the storm and was kind enough to come help us. As i'm holding the wooden and metal pole waiting for the supplies, i see a bunch of lighting in the distance. Uh-Oh! We used a couple extra metal stakes to splint the broken joint and duct taped the entire area. We then moved our tent between some metal buildings to shield us from the wind, although as the storm got closer, I moved my sleeping bag closer to the center, further from the metal building. Even though getting struck by lighting has about the same probability as winning the lottery, I didn't want to risk it. The strong wind continued much through the rest of the night with the tent struggling the entire time. Needless to say, we didn't get much sleep, but the tent miraculously stayed standing. The next day however, while at our worksite we received a call from the farm that two of our team's tents had collapsed. We knew for sure that one of them had been ours. More on that later, as well as our work. We're on the road once again and will be in Billings shortly. Unfortunately, my phone was near dead most of the time at our campsite, but I'll catch you up soon.

The Methodist Connection

It never ceases to amaze me how interconnected our churches are and it always leaves me desiring that we further utilize our Methodist connection of churches. Last night we stayed at Manito UMC in the Spokane Washington area. Day two had us travelling through the rest of Eastern Washington, the Idaho panhandle and most of Montana. We've now left our Pacific Northwest Conference and can further see our Methodist connection with our jurisdiction - the Western Jurisdiction. Tonight we are staying at First United Methodist Church in downtown Billings. I'm quite excited to see the atmosphere of the church in this urban setting, even if we are only here a short while. A couple of our team members that are pulling trailers have decided to move on a little further tonight. After tonight, we will be taking the Methodist connection another step by traveling into another jurisdiction - the North Central Jurisdiction, my old stomping grounds. It is neat to see our other churches open their doors to us for a place to stay along the way to our service project. It is kind of like trekking across country and hitching a place to stay from a fellow friend you know along the way (even though in this case, sometimes we've never met before). It reminds me that we are not the only ones on this service project, that all the people of these different congregations are with us, all our family, friends, and churches that support us in any way, all those that helped plan our trip, or helped put our team and steering committe in action, and all those that helped stock our disaster response trailer. How can we continue to make this Methodist connection even stronger and utilize this larger community even greater to do more in the world? Please do share your ideas.

We've had good travelling so far these last two days. A nice trip through the Eastern side of Washington yesterday followed by good weather for our time through Idaho and most of Montana today. I haven't been through much of this part of the country since my drive out to Seattle from Michigan some 7 years ago. I'm reminded of that great trip with my friend Amanda as we pass by much of the topography that is familiar. And since my current ride, an electrical engineer from another church in my conference, is quite familiar with much of Montana, I'm learning a lot about the different places along the way that I barely knew during that initial drive so many years ago. We stopped by the Berkley pit in Butte and I learned all about the mining history of the city and nearby Anaconda. I've also learned alot about wind energy, which is great since it offers a clean source of alternative energy and I'm happy to hear of the progress our country has made so far. Well, tomorrow we'll soon be in North Dakota camping for real on a farm. Not sure how much access I'll have to my blog, but I hope to write again soon!

Well, in case you didn't already know that Methodist love acronyms, you do now. Engineers do too, so I'm in double trouble. I've put together this blog so that family and friends can follow my adventures on my Pacific Northwest Conference United Methodist Church Early Response Team (PNW UMC ERT) trip for flood relief work in Minot, North Dakota. This is my first experience in doing my own blog (thanks go to Sandy for the advice), so we'll see how it goes. I'm doing this by cell phone, so the entries may be short and could take some time depending on Phone coverage. But please comment along the way.

My adventure first starts on the bus, or at least on the way to the bus...Sporting my new fabulous Deuter trekking pack I sprint down the Seattle sidewalks to 2nd avenue to catch a bus. I'm out of luck if I miss this bus since I'm due to meet some teamates in North Bend at 1:30 and there aren't many cheap ways to get to North Bend when you don't have a car. As usual, I'm running late and get out of the office later than intended since I was trying to finish up a report. Luckily (or maybe due to careful planning) I make it to the bus stop with several minutes to spare. I get on the nice Sound Transit bus and chill out for awhile and before I know it, I'm getting off at my first stop, the beautiful Issaquah Transit Center. I honestly didn't know that this would be where I was stopping since I have a bad habit of just pulling the bus cord when the blue dot get's close to my destination on my iPhone map, so it was a nice treat. I then boarded the 209, the smallest public transportation bus I've been on in the Puget Sound area. It's quite cute! I've seen a nice small town, Fall City, and just saw a really old train. It is nice to see our public transportation system in such good use as this bus is full of people. Well, soon I'll be meeting up with some teammates at Safeway for lunch and then it's off to Spoakane! Hopefully, I'll have some more stories to share!