Over the Next few post I will be chronicling a trip that me and my best friend took from May 16th- May 31st 2011. My friend, Jordan, and I met in college in Michigan. Both of us at the time were attending Lansing Community College, were roommates, and attended the same church. Over the time that we were roommates we became really close friends. I decided to transfer schools to Brigham Young University - Idaho during the fall and decided to take online classes my first semester of school. After this i had to move out to school.
Jordan served his mission in the Kenya Nairobi Mission. This mission covered Kenya and Tanzania and Jordan wanted to visit his mission area. We had been talking and he was planning on visiting right after christmas but had also said that he wanted to take me out to school. With doing both it would be too much time to take off of work and so he took me out to school and decided to put off going to visit his mission. I didn't think much of this until I was talking to him later about it and realized that he wasn't going back because he was taking me to school.
That semester in one of my classes we were talking about Egypt and the creation story. I had the idea that it would be really interesting to go to Egypt and see the pyramids. Well this reminded me that Jordan served in Kenya and Tanzania and that I had this extra money (at the time...) from student loans. My major is International Studies- Political Science with a cluster minor in Chinese/Russian. So with being an International Studies major, the school encourages International Experiences. With this extra money I thought that it would be a great idea to go to Africa with someone that had lived there over a period of 2 years. So I contacted my friend, he was all for the idea, and we purchased tickets 2 weeks later.
After about 2 months of preparation, we left. We flew out of Toledo, Ohio which was a small nothing to do while you wait airport. Our flight was delayed an hour so when we got to Chicago we had to book it to our next flight that conveniently was on the other side of the airport. We made it with plenty of time to spare since they were still boarding the flight when we got there. Over the next 10 hours we were excitedly anticipating out arrival in London, with random outburst of "We, We, We so excited" from the stupidly popular song "Friday" by Rebecca Black, and much movie watching. When we arrived in London, we had a 36 hour layover. We took this time to look around, so we checked our bags for a few hours and looked around. Almost immediately we found Chinatown, which is especially funny because I served my mission in Australia Melbourne West, Mandarin speaking. It was like my Asian senses were tingling. We sat down and ate in a Chinese restaurant that the food although good did not sit well in our stomachs. After that we walked around viewing all the touristy sites, Big Ben, Parliament, The Eye of London, Westminster Abbey, Shakespeare's Globe Theater, London Bridges, Buckingham Palace, the Royal Wedding spot, a few parks and other places along the way. We took the Subway out of and back to the airport and were done walking around after about 5 hours. We were both really tired because neither of us slept on the plane and we were just ready to be done. As we were returning to the airport, both of us were falling asleep. We tried looking up hotels which were super expensive and you'll later hear, and so we decided to check our bags in and sleep in the airport.
When we went to check in, we were told that our flight had been cancelled and that they were going to book us through a different airline that was leaving in an hour and a half. we got ourselves squared away and headed to the other terminal where we would be taking off. We had to take a train over there so it took quite a bit of time. After we got ourselves there and checked our bags on the flight, we had about half an hour left before our flight was supposed to take off. While waiting in line, I figured out that I was missing my carry on bag. This bag had my Malaria pills, all of my money, my camera, phone, and sunglasses in it, so loosing it was one of the worst things that I could have done. I had given up hope on this because we only had a little time left before we had to get to our flight, but Jordan thought maybe it was left on the train. So he ushered me back to the elevator down to the train and we both went to check for my bag. Luckily people in London are nice enough to turn valuables in to the airport without taking anything and I was able to retrieve my belongings. We raced back up to security and made it through in less that 15 minutes, which is amazing for London Heathrow. We ran to the gate and boarded just in time. We were now on our way to Africa, resting after an interesting first day on the trip.
Friday, September 9, 2011
First Post
Hello all! My name is Benjamin Boardman and this is a blog to chronicle my world travels. I love traveling and so far i have been to 15 different countries. Ill post more about those later going back through some of my former travels and my current one, a study abroad in BeiJing, China. Im really excited to share all of my experiences. Anyway till next time!
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