Baltimore Part One

Last week I had an amazing opportunity to minister to a group of high school students while assisting them in ministering to the kids in the Baltimore, Hampden area. The week had many interesting moments both in ministry and out.

We left on Friday morning and it was destined to be an interesting day. I rode in the "man van," aka...all of the boys and me :D haha...It was actually not as loud and obnoxious as I thought it would be. They guys slept most of the way and had their ipods on. I did basically the same. I didn't sleep, but I did have my ipod in listening to music and some podcasts. Not to mention that I took in the beautiful scenery of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Maryland. That night after we got to the church where we hung around and got to meet some local people who were walking down the side walk and were able to invite them to the sports camp and kids fest. It was great to see Dan, the pastor of the Village Church, that we were working with talk and interact with the people in the community. Around 11:30 pm, some of the adults arrived with the trailor and our luggage and bedding. We unpacked, blew up the air mattresses and headed to bed.

Saturday was July 4th and we spent most of the day in D.C., but before we went to D.C. we showered in some of the houses of Village church members. I took four of the girls with me and we treked down the hill to Azure's house. She was really nice and I had a ton of fun talking to her. After showers, we walked back up to the church, then several of us headed to Subway to grab lunch for everyone. After lunch, we drove to the metro station, then hopped on the metro, and headed to D.C. This trip on the metro was a rather uneventful one, on, off, switch, on, off, and done, later this would not be the same story. Our first stop was the Capitol building where we had a tour. After the tour, we were mildly disappointed because we were not going to be able to got the the Holocaust museum, we then walked around for a bit and then headed to the Air and Space Smithsonian. Here we ate lunch and the girls decided that we were exhausted and we went to the Planetarium show so we could sit and relax. After leaving the Smithsonian we headed to The Mall, we walked through the park area and past the Washington Monument, we hung out here for awhile. Then we walked to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. we chilled here until the fireworks started since it was closer than the mall to the metro. We saw them from the corner and then headed to the metro station to head back to Baltimore, what we didn't know was that our hopefully 25 minute metro ride would turn into a 2+ hour ride where we would no longer be in one large group. I was split up with 2 others almost immediately. Needless to say that after two hours and multiple misdirections, after going to the stops at Arlington and the Pentagon, we finally made it to our stop outside of Baltimore. Funny thing is that even though all of the others had made it back before us, they were unable to leave the metro station to sit in the vans due to the fact that I had everyone's metro card. Oh fun times and a really long night
More to come soon :D