Not the arrival we expected.....

We found the church with no problems, but when we got there we didn’t anticipate all that would happen next. We arrived there at were let in and given a tour by the pastor’s wife. The pastor was not available because he was sick. The pastor had recently had surgery and was given morphine for 8 weeks. The weekend before we arrived was the time he was to stop taking the morphine and he was going through terrible withdrawals. Then as the pastor’s wife showed us around she showed us where we would sleep. The Sanctuary. This is not what we expected… When TEAMeffort made reservations they went to NY to meet with the pastor and he showed them around the facilities where we would be staying. There are three floors to the church and the second and third floor contain rooms with bunk beds and bathrooms with showers. Very nice facility. Well at some point between March and the time we arrived they got into trouble for housing volunteers on the floors with no fire escape. They now have to do several construction projects on their church to reach fire code. They did not inform us of this before we arrived and this is not the best situation. We decided to go outside and try to unpack a little and figure something out. When we got back to our car there was a ticket for $115!!! PS you cannot park within fifteen feet of a fire hydrant on the street (we parked about ten feet away from it….) We talked to some of the TEAMeffort office staff and decided to start looking for better housing in the morning (it was after six so we couldn’t get a hold of anyone that day) We were all stressing a bit, so we decided to go into Manhattan and eat dinner and look around. Try to take our minds off the situation. We had a lot of fun and paid WAY too much for dinner then headed back to the church to sleep.