We arrived in the early morning hours of Wednesday, September 5 in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India after two 9 hour flights from Salt Lake City. We are now 12 1/2 hours ahead of Tempe, AZ, USA and will be for the next 22 months.
{NOTE – We have emailed you (or have attempted to do so) many times over the past 7 months, but the connection has been sporadic. Our Cox email won’t penetrate the USA because it is a “foreign” ISP address. We have developed this blog, so that you can follow our travels…or not. If you hear people lamenting, that “we never hear from the Gibsons”, please forward this link to them. We don’t want to leave anyone out. We will be catching up on 7 months of blog messages in the next month or so. Thank you for your patience – we have never before “blogged”}
We departed Salt Lake City on the afternoon of September 3 and endured two 9 hour flights: Salt Lake to Amsterdam; Amsterdam to Bengaluru. Bill never experienced jet lag before, so it was a new experience for him. The constant fatigue takes about 1 week to fully recover. The most exciting part of both flights is pictured below. I am reminded of the late Paul Ewald (those in the BLM Phoenix District will remember him). He would have said this: “I fly halfway around the world, 10,000 miles, and all I get is this lousy piece of chicken”. No, Fareed, we didn’t stop at the CirKle K “gut bar” before we boarded. Actually, the food on Delta is quite good.
We spent one day in Bengaluru for Mission orientation, then we took one more flight, this time to the city of Chennai. Chennai will be our base of operations for the foreseeable future. It is one of India’s larger cities, at 13 degrees N latitude, situated on the southeast coast of India on the Bay of Bengal, in the state of Tamil Nadu. The metro area has a population of 10 – 12 million people. We will spend some time in Coimbatore, which is in the foothills of the Ghats, about 250 miles southwest of Chennai. Coimbatore metro area is about the size of the Phoenix area, with a population of 4 million. It is 400 meters (1312 feet) altitude and is 11 degrees N latitude. You have probably guessed that there is no “cold” season here – it is only hot and hotter. Phoenix actually gets hotter than either of these cities. Humidities in both cities hover around 60 – 75% most of the time.
