While we were at Annual Conference, we had a breakfast meeting with our trip leader Bishop Fannin and his wife Faye. The Fannins seemed very warm and friendly, and were so understanding about our need to bring the boys with us to breakfast. We also got to meet the other clergy who will be traveling with us: Jim Thomas who serves as the pastor of East Naples UMC; Brett Opalinski who serves as the pastor of Memorial UMC in Fernandina Beach, and Debbie's good friend Lisa Degrenia who serves as the pastor of Community UMC in Debary.
There were a few other clergy at the breakfast who had all either been on the trip or led the trip in previous years. These folks now serve as trustees with Bishop Fannin of the Simpkins Endowment that provides the trip and were the ones who reviewed the applications and selected those of us who will be attending. They helped share some details about their experiences and along with Bishop Fannin, answered questions about what to expect.
We received all of our travel documents while we were at the breakfast, including our airline tickets, nametags and luggage tags. We found out that this trip is arranged through EO, which is the group we traveled through when we were in Egypt, Jordan and Israel in 2009. The Fannins had actually just returned from a trip to England themselves, finalizing all of our arrangements and itinerary. Another really interesting thing in our packet was a London Pass. It's a card that gets you into a ton of different museums and things to see while in London and comes with an accompanying subway card good for the days of our travel. We used the New York Pass when we traveled there as a couple back in 2003. It was fairly new then but we were so pleasantly surprised - what a wonderful deal it turned out to be. We have already spent some time looking through the book that comes with the card and trying to plan what we will see on our "free time" in London.
The excitement is building - just one week to go!
