Made it!

It was loooooong, but we made it! the Indonesia portion of our journey actually went very smoothly. The rest of it, not so much. It was a bit of a pain in Singapore, b/c we had to leave the airport to stay in a hotel, which involved dealing with immigration, customs, etc. Plus travelling to and from the hotel took extra time. It meant a very short night!!

The flight from Singapore to Tokyo treated us to almost constant moderate turbulance for over seven hours due to a never-ending line of thuderstorms. Poor Tanner threw up about a dozen times...both Joy and I were baptized more than once. After using all the sick sacks in both of our rows, we had to ask for more! Poor little guy!

We arrived in Tokyo and got stuck in a massive herd of people (think African wildabeast migration). I still can't figure out why they always make every person go through security immediately after getting off a plane? Weren't we all ALREADY checked PRIOR to boarding the plane? And if someone was going to do something, wouldn't it have been BEFORE they got off of the airplane? And as if that wasn't confusing enough, they check you again before letting you into the individual gates. So why do you have to get checked extremely thoroughly, just after deboarding??? And there's four or five international flights arriving at the same time, and being ushered through only three lines that move very slow. It's insane!! Well, we would have missed our next flight, but after sweating and working our way through the heard for almost 2 hours, and running through the airport (thinking it had already left, based off of the TV screen information,) we found that our flight hadn't even arrived in Tokyo yet. So we made it on our flight, but left Tokyo almost three hours late.

However, we arrived in Portland after our flight had already departed and were unable to get another flight till the following day. Since leaving the hotel in Singapore, we had been travelling non-stop for almost 40 hours befere we got sleep in a bed. Ya, it was a marathon!! So after five days of travel we arrive here at MAF headquarters, exhausted. But it's been great to re-connect with good friends from the area, and we look forward to the busy week ahead. Thanks for your prayers!

Oh yeah, the locals say it's nice weather here, but we're freezing!!