Last and Quite Possibly the Least

Well I'm writing this post to you from the comforts of home.  It was a long flight, there is just no way of getting around that.  We left Lusaka shortly after midnight, so that would have been early Wednesday morning.  The first leg was to Amsterdam and it took about 9 or 10 hours.  I was kind of squished as far as width is concerned but I was able to sleep from 2am til 7am about.  Not too bad, but it was not the most refreshing sleep.  Got into Amsterdam around 9 or 10 I think.  We had about an hour and a half before our next flight opened it's security so we wandered around that whole time, I don't we ever sat down we were just happy to stretch our legs and then the flight from Amsterdam to Chicago was about 8 hours.  That one was the worst, it was just really painful being squished in my seat, I say I sat for about 30 minutes and then I stood for about 15 minutes I repeated that cycle the whole time.  The width was pretty narrow, and Josh said it was bad for him too.  Josh got some sleep on the second leg of the trip I didn't.    

Well everything was really going pretty smoothly at this point, we watched as all of our baggage came down the conveyor we had a little extra attention at customs because of where we were coming from.  We made it though and called a taxi and we headed off to my Aunt's house.  But this is the one bad part of the trip.  We left behind my brother's checked bag, his huge suitcase.  It made it through customs we remember that, but we don't remember if it made it into the taxi or not.  So it was probably left at the curb in O'Hare, not good. Well we didn't realize this until we were in Slinger though, which is part of the problem if we recognized that we forgot a bag while we were anywhere near the airport we could have gone back and retrieved it, unfortunately it was too late when we realized it. Josh called the taxi company they said they didn't have it, and the airport said that it would have been taken back to KLM if it was found, but unfortunately KLM's O'Hare depart isn't going to open until later today.  

Well anyway I dropped Josh off there in Slinger and then I made my way up back home, coming back shortly after catechism had let out.  I think I made it back around 7:45pm my kids were still awake.  It was good to see them all, I can see how hard my absence was on them by their greeting of me, Crystal did a great job and had tons of great help, but I don't think I'm going to make a habit of leaving my young family for that long anymore.  Stayed up past 10 to help fight jet lag and I got up around 6:30am this morning after sleeping like a log.  Kids enjoyed their gifts so did Crystal.  But it is time to get back to work and I'm already back in the swing of things.

It was fun being able to blog my experience, I enjoyed using the blog kind of as a public journal of my trip and being able to share the events with I guess who ever cared enough to read them.  It was an amazing trip learned so much and experienced so much, the animals were amazing it was simply awesome to be able to spend that time with our missionaries and with the national pastors there in the LCCA, all who are truly brothers in Christ.  I had fun with my brother, and with the Plugers.  It was good and I'm glad I did it.  As I sign off on my (probably) final blog post just wanted to thank everyone for reading it and for posting comments see you around.  -Peter

UPDATE - I just heard from Josh that his luggage was found at the airport and that it was returned to airline and is waiting for him to go and pick it up, so he is going to have to go back to Chicago (tomorrow) to get the suitcase, not fun but it good that he found it.

UPDATE 2 - Just heard from brother he went all the way down to Chicago to pick up his luggage and when he got there he was informed that they had already shipped it to his house, and is probably going to be there when he gets back!  What a pain.

UPDATE 3 - Well it wasn't there when he got back, a couple of days later he called the airline, they said that his luggage was still at O' Hare!  Awesome.  Well they finally did ship it down to him and I want to say Tuesday night he had his luggage, so it took a week, but he was reunited with it.  And that I believe closes the saga of the trip.  It was a blast.