My Trip To New Orleans

I feel like I have told this story a hundred times, but it was a very important lesson in my life. My brother always talked about how much fun he had on the mission trip he attended down in New Orleans when he was in eighth grade. The summer of my freshman year, I also had the opportunity to go to New Orleans on a Lutheran youth gathering. I knew this would be a great opportunity to become closer to God and become closer to my church youth group. I filled out all of the paper work and packed my bags for the week trip to New Orleans. Many of the churches were flying down, but my church could not afford to fly all of our youth. So instead we decided to take a charter bus with two other church groups. We left our church at about 6 o'clock pm on a Tuesday. The plan was to get to New Orleans at lunch time on Wednesday. The bus ride would be a little over twenty hours with frequent breaks. Our first bus driver took us eight hours down into Tennessee where we switched bus drivers. Our second bus driver was ten minutes late and seemed very frazzled. When she pulled the bus out of the parking lot she made an illegal U-turn in four lanes of traffic. A police officer was sitting at the stop light and pulled us over. We thought our bus driver would get a ticket and a small fine and we would be back on our way to New Orleans. This unfortunately was not the case. As we waited on the side of the road, we noticed more police cars coming. I counted seven police cars at one time. We were all very confused and did not know what was going on. Finally a cop came on our bus and told us our bus driver was drunk. They gave her a breathalyzer test and it was so high they took her to the station to confirm it. At the station they took her blood and found out she was indeed drunk. Our charter bus sat on the side of the road for about an hour, while we waited for our old bus driver to come pick us up. He drove us to Wal-Mart where we waited another two hours for a new bus driver. The whole situation brought me closer to God and my church group. I learned on this trip to never take life for granted. Even though we were on the charter bus for over twenty four hours, it was well worth the crazy experience.