Leaving Grand Bahama

Here is an aerial view of the project about half done.

You can see the two long buildings that were roofed--all in about three days' work.

Two of the young guys had taken drones and these aerial views give you a whole different perspective than what you can see from below.

Now it was Tuesday morning, and Jonathan was up about 5:20 a.m. to take two trips to the airport to take all the Pennsylvania crew guys and their luggage in the small church minivan.

When he arrived back, since we still had a couple hours before we had to head to the airport ourselves, he and I began to try to letter a new church sign.

The pastor had asked us to bring stencils from America, but we had no idea what size or style.

So instead we used the old church sign (you can see in the background) for our plan.

It would take me about as long to explain what we were doing as to do it.

Suffice to say that Sam measured from edges of the sign to edges of letters and we'd draw dots and lines.

The Pauluses, who were staying on in Bahamas for a couple more days of vacation after leaving that day, helped us finish the sign. Jeff painted it.

Jonathan had seen how intrigued the pastor was with the wonderful flashlight Jonathan had been wearing on his hat, so he clipped it on the pastor's visor and gave it to him.

He was happy!

We had to fly through Nassau again, and after the week's whirlwind of activity,

we took twenty minutes to sit by ourselves outside in a courtyard

to eat our sandwiches we had made for our lunches.

Coconut palms and flowering trees were so beautiful there in the sunshine.

The weather had been so beautiful, with very little rain.

Benjamin McDowell picked us up at Ft. Lauderdale to spend the night at Hobe Sound. Due to the airline messing up our flight schedule a couple weeks ago, it had been arranged for our family to fly out of Bahamas a day earlier than we had intended. This left us with nearly a whole day layover in Florida. Benjamin had met the first part of the crew earlier when they had a several hours layover.

I was able to do some laundry that evening, as we'd had no where to do laundry in the Bahamas and one suitcase was full of wet towels and dirty laundry!

Next morning after Jonathan and the children got back from fishing, we had just a little time in which to find our way over to visit widowed Kristin Bump, 

whose husband Lester was an old friend of Jonathan's ever since Lester was a little boy.

Kristin's baby Eden just smiled and smiled and laughed and laughed at me. She was such a dear!

Kristin had posted on Facebook that morning that she was having a difficult day of grief 

trying to finalize the wording on the gravestone.

We felt we needed to stop in and just let her know someone cared.

Her twins were in school, but Daniella and baby and her oldest daughter were at home. The oldest must have been shy and didn't come out to see us till just before we left! For support, Kristin has another lady staying with her right now, who took this picture for us.