Day 18 : Travel Home

Wake up call this morning was 2:30am and we got the kids on the bus by 3:15. Many of them stayed up all night having a blast with their new friends on their last night. Only one room slept in & woke up to their room check knock at 3:05. We made it to the airport in Cairns for our first flight in plenty of time. We listened to our "day song" one last time which is something we did every morning on the bus. It was "Run to Paradise" by the Choirboys. 

Said our goodbyes to Dion & Brett as we had our first flight down to Brisbane. This flight was only two hours or so and here, we had to go through customs as we exited the country and got to the international terminal. Our 12 hour flight across the ocean was long, but they really try to keep you entertained and full. We had lunch, then at least four snacks and finally breakfast. 

Once in Los Angeles, we again had to do the customs thing and since we all had to declare our farm stay this took a bit longer than we expected. We said goodbye to the Washington group as we parted ways. 

From LA we traveled to Dallas (roughly 2 hours). Here we had a five hour layover so we got cozy at our gate after feeding the kids dinner. We were waiting, waiting, waiting for boarding to start when it dawned on us that the gate might have changed. Sure enough, our gate was moved from D40 to D6, so we had to run to make our final flight! 

It was 10:45pm before we were on the ground in Milwaukee, making it 1:45pm on Friday in Australia. So a day that started with that 2:30am wake up call on Thursday, ended roughly 35 hours later. In Cairns we watched the sun start to rise in the east, and on the flight to Milwaukee we watched the sun set in the west.