Cindy and I leave Chattanooga at 11:22 this morning, flying to Atlanta. An hour and a half in Atlanta and we head for Los Angeles, where we’ll get our luggage from Delta and check it in on Air New Zealand. (We saved several hundred dollars by booking each segment separately; it’s yet to be seen whether it was worth it to have to handle our luggage each time we change airlines.)
We’ve got about five hours in Los Angeles, so we’ll get some dinner in addition to checking in with ANZ, and then we’re off for the 13- or 14-hour flight to Auckland. Two hours in New Zealand is all we get, and here we fortunately don’t change airlines before we leave Auckland for Cairns, Australia. We arrive in Cairns mid-morning on July 17. We’ve got two nights at Tree Tops in Cairns, which will allow us some rest time from the 30+ hours we just spent in airplanes and airports.
We have an early morning (7 AM) flight on Airlines PNG from Cairns to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, Wednesday, July 19. There is a six hour layover in Port Moresby, which will be used getting in through customs, having lunch at Mapang Guest House (Wycliffe), and then checking in with Air Nuigini for an hour flight from Port Moresby, which is on the south coast of PNG, to Lae, the second largest city in PNG. Lae is on the north coast.
The Brown family will meet us at the Lae airport Wednesday afternoon, and we’ll spend the night in Lae. Thursday morning we’ll make a five-hour drive from Lae to the coastal resort city of Madang, where we’ll spend several nights at a beach resort, before making the six-hour road trip up into the Eastern Highlands, where Ukarumpa is located, near the town of Kainantu.
While it’s been an adventure getting ready so far, today the adventure really begins! Your prayers, especially for the next four days of travel, are most appreciated, and we appreciate those of you who have been praying for us already.