It has been a crazy day so far, not in a great way. When we last saw our intrepid senior couple, they were packing their suitcases, weighing them with the portable luggage scale from Amazon, which works very well. It's a little challenging working in a small room -- only one of us could pack at a time. We also tried to balance things across our two big suitcases, so that if one of them doesn't arrive promptly, we'd still be ok, more or less. For example, I made sure to put half of my socks, underwear, short/long-sleeve shirts, and slacks in each suitcase, plus one suit in each one. Of course, if the suitcase with the toiletries bag gets lost, that's more difficult, but you get the idea.
my wife's cough kept getting worse, even after she took the Delsym cough syrup, which has always worked great to me, apparently not so much for her. Her Afrin spray bottle also seems to have gone bad, in the sense that it didn't let her breathe. We got to bed fairly early, knowing it would be a short night, but her coughing really didn't let her sleep much, if at all. Even though I had my earplugs in, I couldn't sleep well either. By about 2am it was getting to the point where we considered just postponing the trip, but of course that has all kinds of downsides. So, we got up at 2:30am, showered and dressed, then called the MTC security shuttle, which took us to a 24-hour CVS pharmacy in Provo. There we bought Tussin DM caplets, Afrin, cough drops, decongestants, face masks, etc. As senior missionaries we are always supposed to wear our name tags in public, but we joked that, if she was coughing constantly on the plane, we should take them off to not put the church in a bad light. 😉
Anyway, the drugs helped a bit, but there was no more sleep for the night. We finished packing and did some final shuffling of suitcase contents until all four were within half a pound of the 50-point limit. On the airport,scale, all four of them measured exactly 50 pounds -- no decimal point, so it was rounded. Are we good, or what?
We went out at 5:15am to meet the shuttle, which arrived promptly and amazingly could hold all six of our suitcases, plus two more small ones from other passengers. We arrived at the airport three hours ahead of time, fairly groggy. Fortunately, we were able to sleep some on the flight to Detroit, and my wife is doing a little better. I'm really feeling quite a bit better. Hopefully we can zonk out over the Atlantic. Our flight for Rome leaves in just over two hours, and we are parked at the gate.
I sent an email yesterday to the Thackers, the couple we are replacing at the Institute, telling them of our health woes and that we might not be in shape to do all (or any) of what they had on the program for tomorrow. Elder Thacker wrote back saying it was all cool, with a new beatitude: "Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape."
Our next post will be from Rome!