God Speed, Lauren

This afternoon my Naval officer daughter, Lauren, begins a scary, but necessary trip three quarters of the way around the world and across three continents.  She will leave Norfolk, VA, for Detroit, MI.  She will have a brief layover in Detroit and will then fly to Amsterdam, The Netherlands.  After a few hours in Amsterdam, Lauren will then fly to Nairobi, Kenya, and will arrive there on Wednesday night.  Her final LAND destination is Djibouti, Africa, where she will arrive at 1 AM on Thursday.  From Djibouti, she will be flown by helicopter to her ship somewhere east of Africa.  Her final destination is unknown to Mom and Dad and pretty much everyone else.  In fact, her whereabouts for the next 4 months will be unknown to us.  As a colleague said yesterday, when I was in the Army and we were deployed, we were part of a large group traveling abroad, never alone.  I can't imagine the stress around such a trip.  I was going to write that when I was 24, my toughest decision was what I was going to have for dinner or was I going out to party that night.   But then I remembered in reality, I had a pretty stressful job as Assistant Director of Materials Management for a large tertiary care hospital with a multi-million dollar budget and responsibility for a hundred or so employees. I was also finishing my degree by going to school at night.  However, that time in my life was still nowhere near as challenging as to what Lauren has to look forward to.  God speed, "little" Lauren, you are loved and will be sorely missed.