Home Sweet Home

Theses guys are plain crazy when they have not eaten and have been stuck in an airport all day. Our pizza arrived at 10 pm. -no wonder they look half crazed.
Susan trying to eat her pizza while "trying to reschedule our flights that they re booked to the wrong destination.
James, Darrin & Susan hanging out on our flight to Tokyo.


I am not even sure where to begin. There is so much that has happened since our last posting. I will try to give a little update but we are still fighting jet lag so it may be a little patchy.

First- Our flight to our destination was longer than expected. A lot longer. We did not make our flight out of XNA on time which meant that we missed our connecting flight in Chicago. This began a very long adventure and resulted in us spending the night in Chicago. It also meant that we were 24 hours behind schedule if we were able to catch a flight out the next day. The next challenge was getting to the hotel in the blizzard (not a blizzard to Chicago but for us it was a blizzard). It took us three hours to get a shuttle to our hotel. We finally realized that the only way to catch a shuttle was to stand out side in the freezing cold, snowing of course, with 30 plus mile hour winds. Now we now why it is called the windy city. Any way we did this in groups and each time it would take us about 40 minutes to get on the next shuttle. Let me remind you that we were dressed for the tropics-not a blizzard. No coat or cloves, most of us in short sleeves. We finally get to the hotel and eat our first meal that day. Of course since we were in Chicago we had deep dish pizza delivered.

We were able to call the next morning and reschedule flights for that day. Now the hard part of this is that we hard a large team traveling together and we were booked as one so we had spent 4 hours the day in customer service re booking flights. Everyone was great and very patient but we soon discovered that they had booked us on a flight to Germany that would result in us being sent back to the US at our cost and then staring over. Very complex, to difficult to explain but God worked it all out and we got new flights.

We all left Chicago by 2 pm Friday. That was the great news. The bad news is that we still have 22 hours of flight time left and we are officially late. There is nothing that we can do but keep moving.

The flights were very long and many including me were unable to sleep a wink:(

We arrived 26 hours behind schedule with no luggage. It is now time to get to work. The team that was there to meet us had mercy on us and gave us 4 1/2 hours to sleep before we had to report. That would mean that we would be functioning for 60 hours on 5 hours of sleep.

The next hurdle would be jet lag and culture shock followed by 24 hour youth camp for the next 7 days.

There is so much that we would love to share but are unable to do so at this point. We are home and safe and never getting on a plane again (okay maybe one day but not any time soon).

We are still missing the kids. They come home Saturday. We will meet half way again. Noah had been sick most of the time we were gone and is now running 103.5 temp. We are ready to have our baby home again and I'm sure that my sister is ready for him to be home. Kayla had done fabulous and we are anxious to see her. God really sustained us through the trip. I only cried a little the first time I talked to Noah. I talked about the kids a lot and showed everyone there pictures. God just gave me a supernatural peace about not being with them. I needed that so that I could focus on the task at hand. I think that I will really miss them today now that we are home and they are not. I refuse to even go into there rooms because I am afraid that the flood gate of tears will burst and I really need to focus on getting things accomplished here before they get home. I am looking forward to eating at Olive Garden tonight with James. It is our little treat before the kids come back and we have a gift certificate.

The Milners