Getting Back Home

we made our way, slowly, back to america. it was a long return-home trip--about 26 hours.

 thankfully there were good movies to watch like tinker bell.

 here we are taxing off from jakarta.

 where you quickly get over the ocean.

from tokoyo, we flew to los angeles. it was a stressful layover in tokoyo. our flight left jakarta late, and there wasn't much time to catch our connecting flight. there was a person who met us right when we got off the plane to escort us to our gate. once she got us to the right bus (we had to ride a bus to get to our gate), we were on our own. and we had to run for awhile to make sure we got there on time. it turned out we didn't need to run, but we had no idea how much time we had--so we ran. i had to take off my sandals and run barefoot. the nice part about all of that stress was that we didn't have to wait long to board our flight to la. 

in la, we had about a 3-hour layover that stretched out into about a 5-6 hour layover as we had to wait for quite awhile for our plane's mechanical problems. we were all so, so tired. we were falling asleep in the airport chairs. but i was also fighting the sleep since i never knew when we might be able to board our plane, or if we'd have to move to another gate, etc. it was a long wait. but finally we boarded our little plane and made our way to slc.

 as we descended, we could see our lovely mountains and the great salt lake.

 that's a beautiful image of the swirly landscape below.

my mom and brother met us at the airport and took us home. thankfully, all of our luggage arrived without any damage--a miracle given how much luggage we had. we got home and tried to adjust to the weird, yet familiar, feeling of being home.

 the next day, b took some pictures of our peach tree and our pawpaws. shortly after he took this picture, he trimmed the overgrown peach tree (it looks much nicer now).

 we were so proud of the growth and health of our pawpaws.

 and were very delighted to see that there were four pawpaw fruits growing! wah!

 they have continued to grow since we've been home. they aren't monsters, but we will definitely be able to eat them. to think: eating pawpaws again! we haven't had any since the fall of 2007.

 and our peaches! we didn't have tons and tons this year, but we had a good harvest. and they were good. sadly, they're all gone now (i'm writing this on august 24th), but we enjoyed them while we had them.