The trip back home

On Thursday, we made the long trip home - starting at 4am when we got out of bed, till 3pm when we were back in our rather musty smelling house. I think our house must always smell musty, but it's only when we return from the beautiful smelling west, that we notice that our home is musty. In fact, the first thing I noticed when we arrived in Australia for the beginning of our holiday was.... how nice everything smelled. Even the airport smelt nice.

Anyway. Theresa is daddy's little girl. So when it comes to flying, if we want her to fall asleep, Daddy's got to hold her. She fell asleep on her Daddy on the flight from Auckland to Brisbane. We left Auckland airport at 7am. And arrived in Brisbane airport at 7:40am... local time. But the flight took 3 hours or so. Brisbane is 3 hours behind Auckland. So here we are, feeling like it's 10am, and ravenously famished because we ate breakfast at 6am in the airport. So we ate, our last taste of "fast food" for a year or so, although we're not sad to be saying goodbye to that.

Theresa was so tired by the time we boarded the plane to Honiara, that she fell asleep before we even took off!

And she had a double sleep - she went through two sleep cycles, which is great! Usually on a plane she becomes fully alert as she goes through the changes of a sleep cycle. So we were stoked that she slept a while. Jair gently put her down onto the seat in between us to sleep. (there were about 30 people on the plane, so we didn't have to squash.) It looks like she was running in her dreams...

Every other time we've landed in honiara, we fly over the island quickly and then come in from the sea to land. But this time, as a change, we flew in slowly over the length of half the island and then flew over Honiara town before landing. So that was fun, seeing Honiara from the air. I think this is SWIM base:

- near the sea and near a river nestled in the jungle.

After we got through customs, Kevin met us to take us back to the base. They now charge $10 to park at the airport! That came in with the New Year.

We jumped on the back of the truck and bumped along the gravel road (which thankfully, has been repaired so isn't as bad as it used to be) back home to the musty homeliness of our place on SWIM base, Lungga.

We're back, and it's nice to be home and start to get settled back into normal life. We're a bit homesick, and praying for grace for the year ahead, but we know that we are right where God wants us to be.

In the Solomon Islands.