Arrived in Rockhampton!

We made it! After dodging so many potential issues of; flights, visas, and baggage problems we arrived in Rockie (Rockhampton, Australia). As we were driving to the church from the airport we saw familiar things like McDonald’s, restaurants and malls…. We were not in PNG anymore.

How did the trip go? Well, to be honest we did not know when we would make it to Australia, but we ended up only being 1 day late and 2 bags short, compare that to when we entered into PNG 18 months ago 2 days late and 4 bags short we feel like that was better. Before we left Indonesia we had to straighten out our visas and that was almost impossible; Idul Fitri (the biggest Muslim holiday) was going on so everything was closed for the week prior to us leaving, after 5 trips to the office and 2 days of trying to fix the issue we got our visas this past Tuesday. We said our good-byes to our family (which was really hard) and crossed the border Wednesday. After we crossed the border our driver told us the office had issues on Monday and Tuesday the roads were impassable due to rain, we thought “phew, dodged some more bullets”. We left Vanimo Thursday and headed for Wewak, when we were at the airport the man before us in line fell asleep and someone else took his boarding pass, this made us double-check and make sure we got our tickets (only 28 passengers every other day leave Vanimo)! We arrived in Wewak hearing rumors of strikes by the main airline (which we had to take the next day), they were not flying the day before, that day, nor were they planning to leave the next day… Seth was online and making phone calls all day, we still had to pack up our life from PNG, and say good-byes too! Super busy! Seth went to the airport at 4am (that is when they were suppose to open up) to double-check everything on Friday, expecting not to be able to leave, much to our surprise they opened the doors around 6:45am. Seth was one of the first to be in line (many things happened to get to that point), the plane came 5 and a half hours late, we were almost not allowed to be on because it was a full plane and we had more than one bag each, but at the last-minute we were allowed to get on (and there was 15 available seats on the plane). With the delay we were all but guaranteed to miss our connecting flight… but they held the plane because there was 10 of us connecting. The plane took off over an hour late and now we had to make one more flight!

                In Rockhampton

We landed with less than hour before our connecting flight to Rockhampton from Brisbane. Needless to say that’s when the delays snowballed; we got behind people bringing in bugs and illegal live plants in customs, we took a maxi taxi (which we were told that we had to take), somehow it took 4x’s as long and cost 3x’s more than it should have… of course we are foreign and ignorant so we got taken advantage of, and missed our last connection by less than 5 minutes! But it is okay, the next day we arrived in Rockhampton and 2 of our bags decided to stay in Brisbane, that too was okay because they ended up coming later that night.

We arrived in Rockhampton on Saturday and have been loved on by the Pastor and the Church already, we experienced our first western style church service in 18 months with great worship both in the word, music, and fellowship. We feel like kids again just being in a familiar place getting great food, western conveniences, and being with spiritually minded people.

We are taking this week as sort of “rest week”, we leave in 8 days for Vanuatu, we know that we will have to be ready to serve for 4 months in many capacities before we come back to the states. Pray for our trip and that it is a smooth transition, pray that we can be a blessing and encouragement to the CSL team, pray we can get our minds geared up for CLA again, and pray God gives us wisdom as we will be taking a survey trip in August to see if God would have us serve there full-time.

As always, we are humbled to be your feet to the unreached, Seth and Nicole Stokes.