Only the beginning...

West Chester, OH.
We decided that we were having so much fun in Ohio with everyone that we would stay another night. We spent most of the day hanging out around the house, and had an awesome breakfast cooked by Kelsey's parents (who were a huge blessing.) Later in the afternoon a bunch of us went to Chick-fil-A for lunch, which marked our first Chick-fil-A stop on the trip. Then after Chick-fil-A we all headed over to IKEA, which is completely unexplainable with words. IKEA is my new favorite place, and I want one! They have the best apple cookies in the world, and I have a feeling that when I get older I might have an addiction haha. So if you don't know what IKEA is then you need to go to one, or check it out online. Checking it out online does it no justice. I have never seen a store this big, and this amazing. Who expects a furniture store to have a food court, groceries, and toiletries. Basically you don't really need any store but IKEA. The downpoint in the day was when I lost my camera in IKEA which is MASSIVE, but since they are so amazing there all I had to do was walk back in and my wonderful friend Megan asked the first guy we saw, and they had already found the camera. Not only is it a great store, they have great employees, and they said I should work there! The day just kept getting better after IKEA when we had our white elephant gift exchange, where I got a Starbucks gift card. Everyone should be proud of me because it has been 2 whole days since I recieved that gift card and it is still in my wallet :-) For dinner we went to Max and Erma's which for the longest time I could not understand the name when people were saying it. It was pretty good, and what made it better is that Mike lost the salt and sugar game for the 3rd time. Note- I have only played this game 3 times in my life, and he has lost every time. After dinner we all headed out to downtown Cinci to ice skate, and Sammy Mallory met us there since she was not able to come to the reunion because of her family Christamas. Someone borrowed my new ski gloves to go skating and didn't return them, so if you have them that would be awesome if you could let me know!!! I just bought them last week and never used them. We were waiting in line to ice skate and I just decided that I was going to hang out with Megan, her friend Sam that met us there, and Phil since he didn't want to skate. Phil and I just ended up walking around downtown Cinci until we found this awesome guy named Richard who needed some help. Phil and I went for pizza with Richard, and tried to talk to him about his life. He didn't really seem like he wanted to share much, but Phil got out as much as he could. Richard had been on the streets for about 6 months, and was not having the best time of course. So he was just very appreciative that he got some food, and was very suprised that we didn't just get him pizza and leave. We actually talked to him, and really wanted to know about him. This was of course a little bit scary of a situation at first, but after a couple minutes it was so interesting even though I didn't know what to ask him. So Phil did most of the talking, but it was just so amazing to step out of my confort zone. While we were sitting in the pizza place some dude named Rock came in and Richard left. Rock was quite an interesting character. He was a "vendor" as he liked to call himself. Rock really wanted Phil and I to buy a stuffed dog, and some cologne. Although he was fairly convincing he didn't get any of our money. He realized that Phil just wanted to talk to him, and tried to sell him the convorsation. It was easier for Phil to not give him money since he did tell us he was going to buy gin with it, and it was actually Megan's money that Phil had. After rubbing the stuffed dog all over Phil's face and being thoroughly creepy Rock realized that we were not interested and he peaced out. We left the pizza place to go back to the ice skating rink. When we were leaving Rock may or may not have shown Phil a gun... we don't really know, but anyhow he tried to yell at us to give him his chain back that he gave us. He didn't give us anything, so we just kept walking, and went back. We looked for a place for Phil to pee for about 15 minutes until we actually found something, then we headed back to Kelsey's house. I watched Ryan and Kyle tie a shopping cart to the back of a car and ride in it for a while, then headed insideto hang out. It was another amazing night of fellowship with people who have really meant a lot to me. These are the people that were with me when I made the best decision of my life to attend Messiah. These are the people who helped me really know what life as a Christian is like, and what it should be like. These are people that God sent me all for a reason, and I thank him for that! So thank you everyone in Cinci for an awesome time!