A Beloved's Journey

 The past few weeks have absolutely flown past with organising the last few details of the trip. I have bought all the things that I need for the trip and my bags are packed. I have two more days at work and then 3 days to finish off some last minute things at home before flying out of Christchurch at 1:10pm on Saturday. The closer we get the faster the clock seems to tick down! There is a mix of great excitement in becoming a family and going on an adventure but also a sense of being overwhelmed with the hugeness of those two things. But I know that God travels with us and before us.  Packing was an interesting dilemma. We are allowed 30kg checked luggage for all our flights to Delhi and 7kg carry on. We arrive in Delhi at around 4pm on Sunday and go straight to the hotel to sleep as we have to be awake at 2am the next morning to be at the airport by 3am for a domestic flight at 5:15am. We are away for 3 days and our domestic flight luggage allowance is only 15kg meaning that we need

The title of this blog really lets the secret out, but it's the journey there that is the real story. Near the end of last year I started looking at flights and accommodation as I prepared to travel to India, hoping to leave in early February. At the time there were several depending factors including booking a space in MIQ*, isolating for a week in India and working out who was going to travel with me. MIQ was an interesting dilemma as I had to work backwards and forwards at the same time as when you go into a MIQ lobby you aren't guaranteed the date that you want. At the time isolation in India was just for some high risk countries including New Zealand. In order to book MIQ I needed to know how long it would take to fly to and from India (at the time I was planning on flying to Mumbai), stay in a hotel for 7 days in isolation, get a test on day 8 and wait for the results, work out how to get from Mumbai to Akola (train-10 hours, plane and drive-6.5 hours or just drive-16 hou