This was my second year to go on the Diakonos Spring Break trip. Every year, CVCA sends some students and adults to go help Habitat for Humanity in a city within a few hours of NE Ohio. This year we went to Battle Creek, Michigan, with 25 students and 8 adults.

We could not have asked for a nicer day to travel on. We met at the school last  Sunday around 12:30, and we got on the road around 1:15 or so. We loaded into 4 vans, 1 pickup truck, and my car (a Ford Focus hatchback). Last year, we used my car to haul stuff, but this year it was not needed for that. My car was going along mostly as a around-town vehicle to run errands in, which it is very handy for.

The weather was fine, and we took route 80 West into Indiana, where we headed north on route 69. A short trip west on I-94 took us to Battle Creek. We had two short stops along the way – once in western Ohio, at the only non-renovated why-did-we-stop-at-THIS-rest-stop stop along the highway. Folks used the bathroom and bought some food if they wanted to, and we got back on the road fairly efficiently (about 15 minutes). We then stopped about an hour later in Michigan to gas up some of the vans. All in all, I think the trip took about 4.5 hours.

Once we got to the Habitat for Humanity building we would be staying in, we unloaded the vans, and we got set up in our rooms where we would be staying for the week. The facility was fairly nice; the girls had two smaller rooms to keep their stuff in and sleep in, and the guys had one small room to stash our stuff in; we slept in the big common room. Habitat provided small mattresses for everyone – they were thin (about 3″ thick), narrow and long, and most people just threw their sleeping bags on the mattresses. I have back problems, so I brought an air mattress to sleep on – I was spoiled, but it kept my back in fairly good working order for the trip.

The facility had 4 bathrooms – 2 guys’ bathrooms and 2 girls’ bathrooms. During the week, after we got back from the job sites, the girls got to “convert” one of the bathrooms into a girls’ bathroom so they could have 3 showers (there were 19 girls to 14 guys on the trip). The kitchen was fully equipped and could seat all 33 of us, albeit a little cosily.

So, the trip got off to a very good start. I’ll try to blog more over the next few days. I’ll break down the trip into categories: the working day, the spiritual life, and entertainment.