Morning by the fire                     Long Point Trail hike             Bouldering                                       Taco night                                      

Last week the whole Gentino family congregated in West Virginia for a three-day reunion. We haven’t all been together since Joe and Lindsay’s wedding five years ago, and since then we’ve collectively had a cross-country move, a high school graduation, adopted two kids, and birthed two kids. So it was high time for us to catch up in person. Steve and Linda chose the perfect place for us to stay, at an adventure resort in the mountains outside Fayetteville, West Virginia, a close-to-halfway spot between the South Carolina Gentino’s and the Pittsburgh Gentino’s. The Seattle contingent flew out to meet us. We stayed in four cabins, which shared a clearing…

So here’s the point of the trip where things get blurry. After a lovely, memorable day with Amber, she caught a cab and took us back to the airport at 12:30 am and we said our good-byes. Our flight to Frankfurt, Germany was at 2:30 am, but as you know with international flights you need to be good and early. By this point we’d had less than 2 hours of sleep in the past 24 hours, and I was still desperately trying to recover from my stomach bug. We had a 4-hour flight, and I dozed a little bit, but neither of us can sleep well on planes. Then, we…

Our church sent us on this trip to North Africa both to connect with the mission agency we partner with, and to visit our friend Amber. She’s been a member of our church for several years, and was a faithful servant, friend, and Life Group leader, before moving overseas eight months ago. This was a highlight of the trip for us. We planned two days and two nights with her, but sadly the flights kept getting delayed over and over in the weeks leading up to our trip, until in the end we had only one day — 18 hours to be exact — with her. And so I asked…

The last stop of our trip was a visit to see our friend Amber, who’s studying Arabic full-time in another North African country. David booked the flights months ago, which had us arriving in her city at 10:00 pm, spending the night in her flat, and then a full day with her before she needed to take us back to the airport at midnight to fly home. Well, a few weeks ago, the flight got delayed by several hours. Thankfully, we knew in enough time so that David could get us late check-out from our resort, so that’s how we got to spend our third day there. We checked out…

A shuttle picked us up from the resort at 8:30 Sunday morning for our day trip, and took us to the harbor which was crammed with boats and people. For whatever reason, David and I scored a boat with nearly all people from the Middle East — there were just us and a couple of Russians along with them. The atmosphere on the boat all day was friendly and jovial. David and I had a great time meeting and talking to a wide variety of people, sipping hot tea and drinking in the glory that is the Red Sea. We met a sweet young couple on their honeymoon, watched the…

When we decided to travel to North Africa together this summer, David promised me that a 15-year anniversary getaway would be included. He asked a friend from Phillip’s team for recommendations, and she pointed us to a tourist destination town on Red Sea, and even booked flights and a resort for us. We took a taxi straight from the team retreat to the airport for the one-hour flight to the coast. We arrived, were picked up by the resort’s shuttle service, which looked nice enough, but honestly had no idea what to expect from our hotel. Our friend told us it was a five-star, all-inclusive resort, but the price we…