Our Trip Blog

The Events of Friday, July 29, 2011

                I didn’t think I would have to blog today, but since we arrived at our house at 12:30 a.m. and our trip still wasn’t over yet, I guess I will. Once we arrived home, we went into the garage, took off our shoes, and tried the door. For some reason it was locked. We don’t usually lock the door between the garage and the house, so we weren’t prepared for this. We searched through all our bags, seeing if we might have a key, but we could not find anything. So we turned to the next option.

Aunt Pat has a key to our house, so, even though it was one in the morning and she would probably be really exasperated, we drove to her house. Her bedroom window was open, but even so it took us a while to wake her. She wasn’t expecting us, obviously, so she almost didn’t come to the door. Soon, however, she met us at the door and gave us a ring of keys. Bidding her a “See you tonight for dinner”, we took keys and drove home. On the way, Dad was jingling the key chain the Herscowitzes had given him when he found he had two keys on the chain! He had the house key all along! We all enjoyed a good laugh over this.

                Using this key, we let ourselves in and went upstairs. I was changing into my PJ’s when I heard boisterous laughter coming from downstairs. I ran down and found Aunt Pat holding up keys. The story came out that she had accidentally given us the wrong keys. She had given us the keys to her house, and realized that just as she climbed back into bed. So she had come in her car to give us the right keys and was very confused how we could have gotten in the house with the wrong set of keys. This was all at one in the morning, so we were all pretty loopy. Chuckling, I went upstairs and promptly fell asleep.

                The next thing I knew, it was 6:30 a.m., and I couldn’t sleep anymore. I went downstairs and found my parents sorting two huge boxes of mail on our huge, fuzzy semi-circular couch. They bid me good morning and I started to help them sort the mail. They were a lot of letters that said “Open Immediately” on them, but that we had actually received months ago, when we weren’t here. Oh well! By nine everybody was awake, and we settled down to a delicious, scrumptious breakfast of crunchy grapes, bananas, fresh orange juice, and leftover cereal. Then the great unpacking began!

                While the family circled through our perfect, wonderful showers, anybody who was not showering was un-packing everything. We threw everything into the laundry, probably totaling about fourteen loads, and promptly started it, hoping all of it will be done by the time school starts. We mostly spent the morning unpacking and moving in until about eleven.

                At eleven, we went through all t               he cupboards and the pantry, writing down what we had, not what we needed. Our plan was to go to the wonderful American store called Costco, and buy everything that we didn’t have to restock. Well, not everything. But first, once we were at Costco, we ate a wonderful American lunch (with hot dogs!) in their wonderful food court. I love all wonderful American things and, because they’re American, most of them are wonderful! After lunch we walked through the aisles, picking everything that we needed, and at the end of an hour, we had a huge cart full of groceries. After some of the tight packing we had to do in Destiny, our French car, it was surprisingly easy to find room for all the groceries in our large van.

                Once home, we piled everything on the kitchen counter, took everything out of the pantry, most things out of the cupboards and started to re-organize everything. Dishes, pots, glasses and food were everywhere. Needless to say, the kitchen was a mess. Before it was all cleaned up, it was time to go to Aunt Pat’s house for dinner. (In case you’re wondering, jet lag actually helped us in this case. At two on Saturday morning, Mom, Caitlin and Lindsey woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. So for the next two hours they quietly finished putting everything away in the kitchen and then headed back to bed. This freed up a lot of time to do fun stuff on Saturday, like go to the California State Fair, which we actually did do!)

                At Aunt Pat’s we had a delicious dinner of ham and cheese casserole, broccoli and brownies. After dinner we were able to play with our little cousins Timothy and Claire, while Mom and Aunt Pat talked life and Dad and Uncle Erik talked books. All too soon we glanced at our watches and saw it was time to go home. Some of us were feeling sluggish again and if we ever wanted to adjust to California time, we need to start with regular bedtimes. So we drove home, and headed to bed, officially finishing this trip.

Our trip lasted 13 months, which is 399 days, or 9,576 hours, or 574,560 minutes, or 34,473,600 seconds; depending on how you look at it. We visited 48 states, 20 countries (including America), traveling 41,245.18 miles by car, and walking 1184.99 miles all over the world. This trip has changed our lives. Thank you for reading our blogs and following our travels. We are now home for (hopefully) quite a while in Elk Grove, California, in the wonderful United States of America.