Our journey home...

Here we are cheering on Holland as they played against Slovakia. Hup Holland Hup!!

The next day we got up at 2:00am and made our way to Schiphol airport. The traffic is really minimal at that time of day! No traffic jams! Hugo's lovely brother Luke had driven to Enschede the afternoon before so he could drive some of us and all our stuff. We made our way to the British Airways check-in counter where they couldn't find our tickets in their system... we tried not to panic... The nice woman at the counter called the ticketing office and located our tickets... whew... She was well aware of the rules regarding around the world travel and so didn't try to charge us an insane amount of money for our second bag per person... 14 rubbermaid totes in all! We had an uneventful short hop over to Heathrow International airport where we waited for 5 hours for our next flight. Heathrow must be the most unfamily-friendly airport there is (besides Sentani airport of course... :-)). There are no fast food places and no kiddy play area. So Starbucks muffins for lunch it was. You are kept in the dark as to what gate you will board your flight until the last possible moment and then everyone races to the gate where the frazzled airport people try to keep order... We had a lovely 11.5 hour flight to Hong Kong with lovely service from the lovely Cathay people. Upon arrival in Hong Kong we went through the quickest immigration ever... he couldn't speak English... Then we went to get our stuff and waited and waited. Then we noticed that the board said that all the luggage for our flight had been off-loaded... Thankfully I noticed a lady pushing a cart with some of our totes on it. Some airports consider our totes to be oversized and off load them to a different area. All the totes made it, whew! Then we made our way to the transit hotel where the friendly concierge guys took all our totes off our hands after which we and our backpacks went to check in. Our rooms wouldn't be ready for a couple hours so we made our way up to the hotel pool for a refreshing swim. It's quite warm and humid in Hong Kong! After 26 hours, 2 meals from Burger King and breakfast from Starbucks, we were on our way to Jakarta. After a lovely 4 hour flight we were back in Indonesia. The immigration line was painfully slow and our luggage took forever to make it's way out onto the luggage belt. Then we had to fend off porters and taxi drivers as we made our way to the counter of the taxi service hired to drive us to the city. They had only a car to drive us in that couldn't accomodate even one of our totes. So we and our four carts piled high with luggage went up to the transit hotel to see if we could store our stuff there. No dice, too much stuff... really?? So we, sweating profusely by now, made our way down again and found a place where you can store your stuff. We were probably overcharged, but we were just glad to be rid of all those totes! Then we went to the taxi and reaquainted ourselves with Indonesian traffic on our way to the guest house in Jakarta. Thankfully we arrived without incident and were able to order supper delivered. Hugo and I were thrilled not to have to eat another hamburger while the kids were thrilled to eat another hamburger. We hope to be here one night and leave tomorrow at midnight for our final flight to our home in Papua. It's been an insanely long journey and we are very thankful for God's care and protection on our way!

Waiting in Heathrow...

The pool in HongKong.
Waiting to board our flight to Jakarta.

Check out the sky scrapers!! At the guest house... Check out the miniscule salad Hugo got with his nasi goreng!