Finally! Homecoming!

Wow, what a journey home from Ethiopia.  You start with a 17 hour flight from Addis Ababa to Washington DC-Dulles, via Rome Italy.  The elevation in Addis is so high, they can't get the plane off the tarmac if they completely fill the fuel tanks on the plane.  They fill them half full, and stop off in Rome to then completely fill up to make it to Washington DC-Dulles.

By the time we'd made DC, Luke's stomach was hurting him pretty good so when we finally had got through customs and immigration (yes we did it LEGALLY) we hit the first place we could find chicken.  Luke has a favorable impression of "American chicken" so we stopped by Wendy's and had a couple of chicken on a biscuit breakfast sandwich.  After some breakfast, Luke met some local politicians campaigning.  It was nice for them to come to meet Luke. 

44 hours!  Other than a couple of cat naps on the different planes on our way home, Luke, Mike and myself were had been up for 44 hours, and we were feeling it!!  Luke was now falling asleep at the drop of a had and falling asleep HARD.  Landing into Billings, just within 30 minutes of touch down, Luke said he was going to sleep, and sleep he did.  He fell into such a deep sleep, I had to pat him on his leg for 5 minutes before he'd wake up. 

But then we got home and came over the top of the escalators, we forgot all about being tired.  How honoring, how surprising.  I knew we had about 20 people that had expressed interest in welcoming Luke home, but we had no idea of the size of party waiting for him.  We know there were a lot of other's that wanted to attend but couldn't because of a busy Friday night, but to all of you that could make it, THANK YOU, you totally blessed us all.