THE TRAVELING PIERCE'S............................................

Travelling has been part of our lives ever since Dad and I were married.  On our six week honeymoon we travelled by train, planes, cars and buses, in sixteen different countries in Canada, Europe, England, the Middle East and Africa.  Too bad we never clocked all the miles we have travelled since that time by various means.

When I was a child, my parents were also travelers.  We travelled by ship and plane and trucks and cars in Africa.  Those were the days of the wood burning trains in Africa, and you always wore the oldest thing in your wardrobe as at the end of the trip the dress or shirt would be full of tiny holes, burned by the cinders flying back out of the train's wood burning engine!   Those trains were not the cleanest places in the world either.  At times the toilets would overflow, the water running down the aisles!

Several times - as a teenager - I would walk to distant villages with my Dad on a Sunday afternoon when he went to evangelize. We also bumped over rough, stony paths in the bush to reach some villages and slept on cots under the stars overnight after an evangelistic meeting. 

Together - and with you kids in tow - we travelled all over the States on furloughs.  I mentioned before how our family and Uncle Jim and Aunt Donna drove all the way from Nyack to Los Angeles our first furlough.  Some years later, when you, Mark, were in eighth grade, Dad and I got on route 80 in NYC and travelled  its entire length to end up in San Francisco.  We knew you would never make it on that kind of trip and so we flew you out ahead of us!  It was a fun trip for us and took us almost a week!  That was the last time we saw Aunt Donna, as they left for Paris and she died there. 

Most of you remember the freighter trips. They were fun the first few days but got kind of boring after a few days at sea.  We did have opportunity to stop and visit the Azores and Monrovia, also Conakry, before arriving in the port city of Abidjan where we debarked and then faced that long road north to Burkina. Those were restful trips for us. Somehow, we always scheduled meetings and family visits right up til we sailed and then had two weeks of vacation, relaxing at sea.  That time at sea was a sort of buffer zone between busy-ness in the U.S. and getting back into the thick of things when we got to Africa, so we enjoyed the sea voyage. 

Our first term in Africa, the roads were horrendous, nothing was paved, so the swirls of dust followed us - and enveloped us.  When we ordered a new International, Dad did not know that you had to order the windows for the back seat, and so it came looking like a delivery truck - with seats in the back but no windows!  What a shock!  And how the dust rolled in and stayed inside the vehicle amd showered us.  Even after a short ride, we arrived at our destination with our skin and clothes full of red dust!  We wore hats and eyeglasses to protect our hair and eyes, but that red dust was all-invading!!

There were not many bridges over the infrequent river bridges in those days. One year going to Kankan for conference, Uncle Herb Nehlsen's truck went on the ferry boat and because there was no wedge or bricks to stop it - it rolled right off the other side into the river!  What a mess that was, getting it out of the water and running again.  Those long trips by car over horrible roads were something we never missed after the governments paved our main roads! 

Trips out of the country - three times to Puerto Rico and also to Kurdistan were also unforgettable.  Beautiful places, both of them, and we loved visiting there.   More about that later.... During Home Assignments we travelled on tours all over the USA, but we also drove down to Florida every furlough to visit Grandma Pierce.  Again there were no car seats in those days and no seat belts, and so you kids moved around and we stopped frequently so that we could all get out and stretch. One furlough we had a station wagon and that was handy as we could make a bed in back for you to play on and occasionally nap. 

After all those years of travelling, both here and overseas, travel is in our blood, and we are still ready to start a long trip at the drop of a hat!  More next time about visits to you kids as you lived all over the place!