TRIP TO THE BIBLE LANDS (1)

Kansas City, Dallas, Maine, Madrid, Cyprus

Sometime in the latter part of 1972, Melvin Wise, from Dallas came to Kansas City to preach in a meeting.  He was making plans to go on a trip to the Bible lands.  Dr. Jack P. Lewis, of the Harding Graduate School in Memphis, was putting the trip together.  Melvin quickly signed up some of our members, and they made the suggestion that I ought to try signing up some people.  I could pay for my trip that way.  Everything fell into place and I was able to make the trip in the summer of 1973.  I had hoped to take Ann, but I fell short of the required number.

We agreed that Ann would take the children to Waco while I was traveling about  the Middle East.  Dallas was one of the origination points, so they dropped me off in Dallas on the way to Waco.   We flew to Memphis, and picked up the remaining persons on our party.  Then we stopped in Bangor, Maine to refuel.  Sometime in the middle of the night we refueled again in Madrid, Spain.  I don’t have a good memory of Madrid.  It was 90 degrees.  They wouldn’t let us off the plane while they refueled, and they turned the air conditioning off.  This was not the way to start the trip of a lifetime, but after about an hour and a half, the closed the hatchway, turned the AC back on and we took off.  We arrived early in the morning in Nicosia, Cyprus.   They immediately put on us a bus and we visited Nicosia and Salamis.   We didn’t know it but there was some kind of riot in Nicosia that day, and our families saw it on news reports in the states.

Late in the day we boarded a cruise ship – The Fiesta.  The Fiesta would become   our home for the next several days.  It was not the Titanic, but it was comfortable enough, and there were no icebergs in the Mediterranean.  There were about 350 American passengers aboard.   All but 50 were from our group.  I shared quarters with three other guys about three decks below.  There was barely room to walk between the decks.  Years later we would stay in a fifth wheeler for a few nights.  The bathroom was about that size.  We were told to bring three changes of clothing.   In order to have clean clothing, we had to wash every day.  I had a little portable clothes line with me that worked well.  The air conditioning failed on the first night, and it took several days to get it fixed.  We had some warm evenings.

We were so exhausted from the trip, that it was hard to concentrate on the sight seeing. I don’t remember much about Nicosia at all, but there were antiquities at Salamis.  It was in Cyprus that we encountered our first “holy place.”  The tour guides show you what they think you want to see, so we were told that we were visiting a church where the finger of John, the Baptist was buried.  Nobody explained how the finger got there.