Mark's Blog

I’m not entering THE BEST LST STORY EVER contest, but I hope you will!  I do, however, have several stories that I want to share with you over the next two weeks as we move toward our big weekend of September 23-24!

If you are a new follower of my blog, you might enjoy reading the series I wrote last year at this time: “A Personal History of Let’s Start Talking” http://wp.me/pO3kT-7U

Santo Domingo

One of Our Best Travel Stories

In 1994, LST was scheduled to go to work with the church in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, for the first time.  It has long been our practice to visit sites before we send teams there in order to make sure that both we and the local Christians/missionaries know what the expectations and commitments are going to be.  LST never goes to work with any church or missionary without an invitation, but a few hours of face-to-face conversation have saved us from many awkward and/or difficult situations.

Our travel agent prepared our agenda and sent the tickets to our office. We threw them into a drawer until the day before we left, but when we did look at them, we noticed that she had us flying first to Miami and then to Caracas, Venezuela, and spending the night there.

I called to confirm this, and she said she was sorry but there were no direct flights from Miami to Santo Domingo!

 And so we left the next day for Santo Domingo via Miami and Caracas.

As we waited in the Miami terminal for our Caracas flight, I noticed on the flight board several flights from Miami direct  to Santo Domingo. I actually called the travel agent from the airport and told her what I saw, but she assured me that she had researched it and we still had to go through Caracas. OK!

We boarded the Caracas flight, flew four hours to get there, then spent the night in a hotel that provided security both from the airport and back because of the threat of highway bandits.

Our adventure began again the next day when we arrived at the international part of the Caracas airport, tickets in hand for the flight to Santo Domingo—but as I looked at the flight board, I didn’t see our flight.  Our flight was VE 122 at 9:25am  and the only flight to Santo Domingo on the board was VD 121 at 9:15am.  Well, it was Latin America, so we just thought someone had made a mistake on the tickets. In these pre-9/11 days, those kinds of errors happened occasionally and were usually no big deal.

We had no trouble checking in for VD 121 to Santo Domingo, boarded the plane—a pretty small plane—and took off right on time at 9:15am.  About thirty minutes into the flight, however,  we started to land. Nobody was upset, so I wasn’t either. It didn’t seem to be an emergency. In fact, we picked up a few passengers on this unscheduled stop and then took off about forty-five minutes later.

Finally we arrived in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic—about an hour later than our itinerary said we would—and were met by very gracious, but puzzled missionaries.

After our sincere apologies for being late and causing them so much trouble, I mentioned that we had had an unscheduled stop between Caracas and SD. They said, “Why did you fly through Caracas?”

“Because you have to from Miami.”

“No you don’t! There are six or seven direct flights every day from Miami to Santa Domingo!”

“No way!”

It took only a few more minutes to unravel what had happened . . . . have you figured it out?

Our travel agent had written our tickets for Santo Domingo, VENEZUELA, not Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.  Santo Domingo, Venezuela, is a small town buried in the Andes—not where we wanted to go.

The hilarious part is that with our ticket to this little Andean village town, we had managed to the WRONG flight on the WRONG airlines at the WRONG time—and got to our desired destination!

God moves in mysterious ways—and so do Mark and Sherrylee!

I’ve got another LST story about flying to Siberia that I will tell you next.