When:  Sunday, September 5  8:30-11:30

Where:  Meet at CCC, we'll take the van to Church Under the Bridge

What:  We'll be serving food to the people at Church Under the Bridge with the regular team from Central.

Kristin put the key in the ignition, and turned it:  not even a click.  The van was dead.  Not a great way to start a week long trip across the country.  It would have been easy to think, "uh oh, this will be a trip full of glitches," and you'd be wrong.  By the end of the week, no one could deny this had been one of the best weeks of our lives (or at least, in recent memory).  

Thanks to some heroism by Russ Putnam and Bob Rulmyr, we got on the road.  It might have been an hour late, but we made it.  Everyone made the flight, and we took off destined for our nation's capitol.  We knew there would be lots to do there:  outreach, worship, sight-seeing, and group building, but we couldn't know what it would be like. 

Tuesday

We woke up Tuesday morning ready to go.  We got on our walking shoes and headed to the nearest grocery store... the grocery store at the bottom of the Watergate Hotel (kinda strange, and cool).  We filled our shopping bags full of food for the week, and we walked back outside to meet our friend who would be with us the rest of the week:  the heat!  We got the food back, and got ready to go serve, and we found one of the coolest places for our first experience.  

At Damien Ministries, we worked beside some of the coolest folks in D.C. at their organization whose goal it is to serve the population of people living with HIV and AIDS in the D.C. area.  We helped pass out food in the food pantry and put together a mass mailing that they needed to get out.  

We worked so quickly that we got out early, so we hit the metro and went to The Mall.  It was cool to see the kids, including me, who had never been to D.C. to walk out and look to the left and see the Washington Monument, and turn to the right and see Capitol Hill.  The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History was next, where the youth got to see things like a 30 ft. long squid and Darwin's original works.  We grouped back up and walked to the Lincoln Memorial, where we were going to meet the other youth groups that were coming.  After some fun hello's at the memorial, we walked back to our housing debriefing and sleep.

I will be blogging about the other days in the days ahead.