We are now back in Utah. We had a great surprise in the Salt Lake airport. Karen's family came to welcome us home. After cramming all the bags into several cars, we all went to Margene's house for a BBQ. It was a lot of fun seeing everyone again.
Friday was a very long day. We got up around 4:20 so that we could make it to the airport in time for our 6:30 flight. We spent Thursday packing all of our stuff into nine large bags. There was no way to make it fit into 8, and we ended up giving away a lot of stuff just so we could make it fit into 9. We also had two bags that were a little over the 50 lb limit, because we were too tired to figure out how to evenly distribute the contents. Anyway, I was hoping they wouldn't pay attention to the scale, unfortunately they did. We ended up paying $75 for the two overweight bags, but were spared the charge for having an extra bag.
We made it to Denver around noon. We were tired and hungry, because no one had had any breakfast. Matthew was particularly difficult, dropping bags, complaining about how tired he was, etc. One over zealous volunteer at Denver decided that Matthew had to go back and follow the proper path through the security check point, after he had ducked under the majority of the ropes lining the walkway. I was not in the mood for this, and simply told him "no." However, Karen decided to humor him so we got to wait while Matthew went back to the start and walked back through the actual path. After a 3 hour lay over in Denver we were finally on our way home. We got back to Utah around 4:30.
On Thursday we spent most of the day packing and selling things. We finally sold our queen size bed to a teacher at the Country Day school in Escazu. Our neighbors gave us a farewell barbecue which was really nice. Jocco and Mailen came as well. Thursday night we stayed in the Hampton Inn next to the airport and returned the rental car which is right next door.
