So here we are in the land of fast internet, but somehow that doesn’t translate into having time to blog!  I’m at Dan’s mom’s house and will try to get some pictures posted of our trip in the next few minutes 🙂

On Saturday January 12 we flew from Wamena to Sentani. Dan was able to fly us down, but due to some unforseen circumstances the flights were a bit delayed so the kids had some time to play at the hangar before we left 🙂

On  Sunday we took the girls out to have some fun. We went to the mall where we spent some time at TimeZone, the local arcade. Claire especially enjoyed riding the little rides. Not too expensive at about 15 cents a pop 🙂

Of course we couldn’t go through Sentani and not go to the pool! Some friends (newly arrived in Sentani from language school) accompanied us, the girls had a great time swimming with their friends.

Monday morning was time to embark the beginning of our long journey to the States!  We started off on a Garuda airplane from Sentani to Jakarta, with stops in a couple cities along the way. Thankfully, although the plane was a bit delayed at the beginning, there were no other problems with that part of the trip.

The girls enjoyed some treats along the way 🙂

On our approach to Jakarta, I noticed that another airplane was landing on a parallel runway exactly at the same time we were landing!

We had some time to hang out in Jakarta before catching our flight to Singapore. After picking up our luggage, the first thing that caught the girls’ eye was an A&W restaurant! Of course, the first thing to catch MY eye was Starbucks!

(Claire took this most excellent picture of Natalie and me :-))

After waiting in Jakarta for several hours, it was finally time for our flight to Singapore. Unfortunately, we waited a bit longer for the airplane to arrive from Singapore before we could fly it back to Singapore! So we arrived in Singapore about an hour late, and headed straight to the transit hotel to catch a few hours of sleep.

We awoke early – about 5 am on Tuesday morning – to catch our early-morning flight to Tokyo. Unfortunately, we were to wait even longer for another delayed flight. While we waited in the Singapore airport the girls had some fun…

 

The entertainment on the United flight from Singapore to Tokyo kept the girls busy!

Our flight to Tokyo took off about 2 hours late, and as our layover in Tokyo was only 2 hours long, I was pretty worried that we would miss our connecting flight! Thankfully we landed with about 40 minutes to spare, and after waiting in line for security and running to the gate, we made it just in time to board our flight… and then sit on the plane for over 1 1/2 hours before we took off! Ugh!   Thankfully the girls did a great job!

When we landed in Seattle on Tuesday morning, Dan’s mom was there to pick us up! We were exhausted but happy to be here!  The first night we all went to bed at about 7:30 pm and didn’t wake up until 11 am the next morning!  The 2nd night the girls were up for a couple hours in the middle of the night, but since then they’ve slept through the night, and we have all just been catching up on our sleep.  We’ve had fun shopping and hanging out with Dan’s mom and are looking forward to Dan’s arrival tomorrow!  I’ll post more pictures later 🙂