Back to Cotonou after 6 hour drive, 2 flat tires, failing bus brakes, 10 encores of Handel's Messiah and a game of "I've never."

Off to bed. Tomorrow a brief time with the Akowanou family and then to the airport for Burkina. Air Burkina makes me a little nervous, so I'll be praying about that. :)

The crusade went well last night after we had to pray away the rain storm. About 20 people came to Christ! Awesome!

Cotonou

I landed safe and sound in Cotonou. I wrangled with all the other passengers and cart guys, extracted my 2 50lb duffle bags and went to find Josue. All went without a hitch really! Amazing! Praise God.

I'm going to shower and go to bed. Tomorrow, Josue and I will hop in a car with a lady and a another man who will drive us back to Savé (5 hour drive). We'll join back up with the community outreaches and then the next day I'll lead a devotional in the morning and preach as a crusade in the evening.

Thank you all for your prayers.

Paris

I'm here in Paris. The flight from Chicago to Paris went surprisingly quickly. I sat next to a young guy who was studying neurological patterns with his computer models. Interesting.

I slept maybe 3 hours. Not too bad, but not too great either. When I get to the hotel tonight, I'll totally crash.

Charles De Gualle airport is hilarious. It's a total patchwork of what seems like hundreds of buildings. To get from one terminal to another, it took about 30 minutes in a bus. I'm sure glad that I had a long layover here...plenty of time to find my way.

It's kinda fun to be in Paris during the Tour de France. I thought that I would see a lot more stuff advertising the race, but I haven't seen anything so far. I guess I was kinda expecting to bump into Levi Liepheimer or some other cyclist who had been disqualified.

I like this blog thing. It's fun thinking about the thousands of people back home who are checking it a few times a day. Right! No, but it is cool thinking of all of you who are reading it. Traveling solo is kinda boring at times. It's oddly isolating because you're around tons of people, but they don't speak your language and they don't really talk to you. Even if they did, you wouldn't share your "deep" thoughts with them. So, when you're alone (and I experienced this in South Africa) you have all these unique experiences and feelings rattling around in your heart and mind and no one to really share them with except God.

But, a blog is a way to journal and to share my thoughts with my family and friends. Pretty cool. Even though it'd be much better if one of you were here with me.

Well, there's not much else to type. I hope to be able to update this at least a few times while I'm en Afrique!

Till next time...

This is a test blog from my cell.