Getting home.

Monday - June 11th

Whew. After such an awesome time with Allison & John these last few weeks, getting ready to leave on Monday morning was definitely something we were all trying to avoid. John had to head into work for the day so he would be unable to take us all the way to the airport with Allison - therefore at 6:45am we were all up to say our goodbyes to him! 


After saying goodbye to John, breakfast and working out was next on the list - none of which managed to actually delay our leaving - so after double extra checking that we had everything it was finally time to head off to the airport. One of Allison's friends helped to drive us and all of our luggage and we made our last drive off of base and through Naha. Had a little mix up as we were trying to check bags & get our boarding passes, the ticket counter told us that our itinerary did not match up with the tickets the computer was showing we had - our itinerary said we were supposed to leave Los Angeles at 12:51 PM, there's was saying the flight wasn't actually until 12:51 AM - the language barrier did not help this get figured out any faster, but eventually we had our bags checked and tickets in hand. This delay [plus traffic getting to the airport] by that point added up to a very quick goodbye to Allison at the airport. Goodbye is always the worst, BUT we still couldn't be more thankful we had been able to spend time visiting!!


The flight from Okinawa to Tokyo was fairly un-eventful, getting into Tokyo proved to be easy as well. Once we got on our plane that we would be taking from Tokyo to Los Angeles we were all pretty excited - lots of fun amenities - more leg room than our flight over, huge TV screens, fun remotes for each person [seat-to-seat texting between the tvs], and we were all sitting next to each other [the flight over we were sitting Adam & I in a row in front of everyone else]. My favorite part of the flight was the after dinner mini-Haagen Daas ice cream that EACH person got - AWESOME!


Eventually we landed in Los Angeles - kind of surreal to all of the sudden be back in the US - all of the signs were in English - woohoo! Our flight from Tokyo got into the airport a little bit late so when we got off of the plane we were given express passes to help us get through immigration/customs as quickly as possible. Even with passes the lines were still kind of long, but we all got through with no problems - we headed to grab our bags, got them re-scanned and re-checked - then it was time to find our last gate. 


Let's just say gate finding was easier said then done. We managed to go to the wrong terminal AND airline a couple of times - which eventually resulted in us missing our last flight. Our itinerary said we were flying US Airways [or so we thought] which meant we originally had to take a bus from terminal 4 to terminal 1. We got all the way to terminal 1 when we learned that our itinerary - in smaller font - under US Airways said we were actually flying a branch of United - which was in Terminal 7 - which meant waiting for the bus to drive us to the LAST terminal of the airport. This chain of events was followed by an hour spent at the United ticket counter getting our flight figured out, getting put on a plane that was scheduled for take-off at 10pm LA time, getting into Chicago at 4am central time, going through security, killing time for the afternoon, napping, Adam & his mom getting us on an earlier flight [YAY!]. 


Our 'earlier' flight got delayed a couple of times, our gate changed, but finally at 8pm LA time we were boarding our last flight. Many times we had the discussion about how we would rather have all this mix up getting home AFTER we had seen John & Allison - than when we were on our way out!


The last flight was mostly uneventful - we did have a passenger pass out around 1am - Adam's Dad was sitting close by and after the flight attendants had paged the plane to see if any doctors/nurses/EMTs were on board [there were none] - his Dad sat with the guy while the flight attendants gave him oxygen/water/food for the rest of the flight. 2am - landed in Chicago! Went to hunt down our bags which had arrived earlier at 7pm with the flight we had originally been scheduled on. Grabbed a taxi - head to get our cars from Concordia [where we had parked them while we had been gone]. Probably because we were all EXHAUSTED - but we ended up leaving 2 pieces of luggage in the taxi, which we didn't realize until we had our cars packed up to leave and the taxi was long gone. Quickly drove back out to the airport and thankfully the cab was still there [I guess he didn't have too many other places to be at 3:30 in the morning]. 


Now it was time for the last goodbyes of this trip - Adam & I were headed to a hotel to meet up with my Mom & 2 of my younger brothers [My move to St. Louis at this point was literally hours away from beginning] and Mr. & Mrs. Rodriguez and Andrew were headed home to Seymour, IN. 


Adam & I got to the hotel with my family at 4:30am - showered and in bed by 5am. The rest of our Japan crew got into Seymour at around 8:30am - bed was asap after that!


I hope you are not half as exhausted reading all of that craziness as we were in the middle of it - even writing it all out now I am still kinda shocked at everything that ensued on our return trip! 


Currently, I am typing this post from my NEW home - Kirkwood, MO - I am still working on getting internet set up, so no pictures from the end of our trip on here BUT if you haven't seen them yet, here is a link to a photo album of most of the pictures from our trip:


Japan pictures!


The "Japan" link at the top of my blog has all of the posts from our trip linked in order in case you missed any :) 


Can't wait to share about my move to St. Louis! God is great & we are all blessed!!!