Made it!

We're here!
Praise God! - SERIOUSLY -

We show up to briefing and we're just under 20K short. We tell our team, everyone makes phone calls during every "free time" that we get. Two and a half days later, we're all on the plane. BAM.

We show up to briefing and Jack has forgotten his passport back home and so his mom overnights it to a staff person's parents' house, just 2 minutes from Vanguard where we're briefing. It's delivered to the wrong house by a brand-new mailman whose contact info the post office doesn't have yet so we can't find it. The staff girl goes around to neighbors and asks around- no passport. Friday morning rolls around, we're getting on a shuttle to LAX at 8, but at 645 she calls me with the good news. The story went something like this:
"My mom was going to go buy milk late last night but my dad stopped her and said 'we have enough for our morning coffee- I'll buy some more in the morning.' So he goes to buy milk at like 630, comes home and finds a woman picking snails off his plants. Turns out she's a neighbor who lives way down the street- they know each other a little bit, so they talk. She was there to pick snails off his plants to feed her turtle. Then suddenly she remembers and tells him that she has the package. She'd stuck in in the mailbox so that the mailman would take it back to the post office and resend. But it was early enough so she ran back, grabbed the package and brought it to my dad."
Thank God for hungry turtles! 1 hour before the shuttle, Jack got his passport.

The travel was long but the flight (on ANA- the airline my family flew to immigrate to America) was very pleasant and though we were nervous about immigration taking forever because of swine flu, we flew through it. We didn't have a way of contacting our Japanese staff person who was gonna meet us at our train station by the apartments, so we just told them we'd be there at 8, hoping that somehow we'd get from the airport to that station by somewhere near 8pm. We just buy a ticket for the first train available after we got through customs, which took us to Shinjuku where we got on a train that took us to Nakano where we got on a train that took us to Koenji. We step out of the station- 8:04pm! They were there with smiling faces just barely waiting for us.

Anyway, GOD IS GOOD. We're here, we're excited (though a little tired). I'll be updating as often as I can but keep us in your prayers!

I'll introduce the team in my next post.