we can fly.

So I guess I need to update everyone on our Christmas and New Years activities. Yay!!

Let’s just start with getting to Christmas break.

Oh man, were we ready. We had game night, the jazz gala… Oh! We also had a tacky, white elephant, Christmas caroling night with our small group, which was really fun. Tommy was recruited to play his guitar for the caroling. My favorite was Feliz Navidad! And we walked away with a vintage Gator Coca-cola bottle (YES!) and . We looked really ugly- just straight out of the 80’s, and not the cool 80’s, thanks to WalMart and Goodwill.

Wednesday December 22nd finally arrived. We worked a half day and went home to finish packing, to change into our traveling t-shirts and jeans, and to make sure my plant was set (I got a mini "aqua globe" to water my plant while we were gone. It actually worked!). Then we got picked up and driven to the airport because...

–dramatic pause-

...we were going to fly on a private plane! Tommy’s dad has a friend who owns and flies his own plane. In order to keep their license, pilots like him have to maintain flight hours. What better way to acquire those than to pick up a friend’s parents in Mississippi and his son+wife in Florida?!

They actually ended up being about an hour late, but we used the time to hang out with our drivers (yes, it takes two chauffeurs and a private flight to get us to Alabama) at Starbucks. Our drivers were our minister of music and his wife, who had offered to take us to the airport so our car wouldn’t sit in a parking lot for two weeks. We really enjoyed talking with them. We talked about music and where we had been involved in churches growing up, we talked about their children and their friends. We even found out that the wife, Mrs. Cindy, was born in El Dorado! The tiny Arkansas town my parents live in! Crazy.

When the plane landed, off jumped Tommy’s dad, two brothers, brother-in-law, Grandmother and Granddaddy, the pilot and the co-pilot. They were a sight in all their sweaters in the 75+ and sunny weather we were having. After a snack and a potty break, we all loaded up the ol' plane and jumped in! Tommy and I got prime seating: back bench of the plane, low enough so we couldn't sit up straight, and I was facing sideways. But we didn't care!!!

Take off! Woowee-- that thing was just moseying along and then shot off! It didn’t take long at all to be way, way high. It was so strange, being so small and being so high in the air. I felt like a pebble… which makes you a little nervous because pebbles fall very quickly. But we stayed up- thank the Lord. We got up to 32,000+ feet, where you see only the tops of the clouds and where the air was negative 30 degrees. And we got to watch the sun set. Holy cow, gorgeous. That brought all the iPhone cameras out. And then we turned on all the cabin lights and the two brothers, Tommy, and I played Spades. See, it was a surprisingly smooth ride, but pretty loud. Above the woosh of the wind passing and the engines (engines? I feel like I should say turbines. I don’t know what a turbine is, but sounds more important than an engine.) roaring you had to enunciate, use hand motions and have animated facial expressions. Well, that’s tiring after about 4 minutes. So cards was an easy solution.

In about an hour and a half, we were landing in good ol’ Huntsville, Alabama.