We woke up at about 3:30AM, because my BlackBerry kept buzzing. Sam, our team leader, had sent me a text message that two of the larger travel team (Tom & Mike) had not made it from Milan, but the other four team members had made it safely to Timisoara.
Lauren was already awake, as she was having trouble sleeping. So we talked and prayed and sent some text messages to my wife Ellen, who was still awake (it was around 9:30PM or so in Dallas), letting her know about what was going on and to ask her to pray for us as well.
Lauren and I talked about spiritual warfare a little and that perhaps this was part of the reason for the travel mayhem. The enemy for sure was not too happy about our mission, as he knew that we would be bringing the light and love of Jesus to the lost in Romania. Literally, we would be "reclaiming enemy occupied territory for Jesus, and advancing the King's kingdom" one heart at a time. Of course satan wasn't interested in that!
And then, my favorite transitional words in the Bible popped in my head, "BUT GOD...". Yes indeed. In my estimation, God was using this for His greater glory somehow, I just knew it. He had all of this under His control, and nothing was going to happen to us that He didn't at least give permission or allow to happen...that's just the way it works!
We were able to get back to sleep for a bit. Later, we got up, showered, had breakfast and loaded up on the shuttle and went back to the airport with Donald & Vicki. We said our goodbyes there, as they had to catch their flight, and we had the rest of the day in front of us!!
The night before, we had read about the many different places to see in and around Munich, so we decided to take advantage of the time God was giving us to try and take a tour of Munich. We checked our luggage at the terminal, changed some dollars into euros, bought some train tickets (finally - I was a little ticket impaired!) and headed down to Marienplatz where we were told that all of the tours left from. Lauren and I were excited about heading out on our own little side adventure!
When we got to Marienplatz, we found no one there really. It was Sunday morning afterall, and apparently we were still a little early for any hustle and bustle. We walked around for a few moments and found a familiar site...THE GOLDEN ARCHES! We stopped in to the McDonald's and had some food and coffee - just killing some time. When done, we went back to the Marienplatz square and hooked up with a tour guide named Chris (from England) and paid 10 euros for a walking tour of some of the older sites in Munich. It was a lot of fun, and gave us something to do to kill time while we waited for our 8PM flight to Timisoara.
We saw the famous Glockenschpeil (under renovation) and tons of other interesting items. Munich is known for beer, the birthplace of Nazism and Hitler's rise to power, 1972 Olympic shooting of 11 Israeli athletes, the headquarters for BMW (Bavarian MotorWorks), the headquarters for Siemens, etc. You can check out the pictures of a number of the sights we saw. We finally made it back to Marienplatz, had some lunch and got on the train back to the airport. We were pretty tired from all of the walking (a little over 2 hours of it), but we were glad to spend the time together that way! We picked up our luggage, got checked in, bought some post cards and a FC Munich t-shirt for my son, Dylan, ate again and then crashed at our gate.
Our flight left relatively on time and we made it to Timisoara at about 11:20PM. We were glad to be there! Our campaign leader, Sam Ingrassia, met us at the airport. We finally got checked in to our hotel, and fell asleep about 1AM...needless to say, we slept well!!
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