Home

For this flight we got to sleep in until 4:30 am.  :)  We got ready, checked out, caught the street car to the train and the train to the airport.  First we had a short 45 min flight from Dresden to Frankfurt.  Frankfurt is the big international hub.  At the airport in Dresden we meet up with a different 12 missionaries.  10 Elders and a couple going home.  When it came time to board the plane they were on the same flight.  I told Dave I was not worried about this flight at all.  With all those missionaries I felt very save, even through the turbulence.  I was wishing some of them would be on our second flight.  We landed in Frankfurt about a mile from the airport.  We caught a shuttle bus to take us there.  As we are on the bus, on of the missionaries got in the same side as us.  We started talking with him and finally Dave asked if the Elder's dad had taught at the M.T.C.  The way the Elder was standing we couldn't see his name tag.  The Elder said he had.  Turns out that the dad had been Dave's teacher at the M.T.C.  Dave said the kid looked exactly like his dad that is how he knew.  The Elder had pictures of his family and showed them to us.  How cool it that?  How can people say that things like that are a coincidence?  Once in Frankfurt we had a 4 hour lay over.  We had to wait in this hallway for over an hour to even see which terminal we were at.

We got some lunch and boarded for our final leg of this amazing journey.  When I asked Cora if she was sick of flying yet, she said definitely not.  We got a new plane going home.  Each person had their own TV in the seat ahead of them.  Kids watched movies, and played games, slept and read.

We left at 1 pm and landed at 3:30 pm.  It was a 9 1/2 hour flight.  The kids decided they were time travelers.  It was a really long flight.  We went up over Greenland and Iceland.  We could track our flight the whole way, which was cool.  The attendants were constantly bring water by, that was nice.  We had a dinner, two snacks and vanilla ice cream.  It was really nice to land and get through customs.  There was a stake youth activity that night that the girls had wanted to go to.  At the point we landed we had been up for 24 hours.  The still wanted to try.  Crazy girls!!  Customs took us a long time and we didn't make it.  Stopped to pick up a few groceries.  And at long last arrived back home.  The next morning we were all up early.  At 3 am,  I finally gave up and started laundry.  It was conference weekend.  The perfect weekend to return with jet lag.  The whole trip was amazing.  We feel so blessed we were able to do this and take the kids.  It was wonderful to be together with our kids all that time and not have any distrstions or things we had to run to.  Also so grateful to see so many things that Dave has told us about over the years.  Hopefully these memories will last the rest of their lives.