Our last morning (Wednesday) in Nepal was spent getting packed, having bananas and oatmeal at home and then walking down to Avocado Café for lunch. I had spinach lasagna and Sandy had a BLT sandwich and we shared a goat cheese  salad. Our taxi arrived at 3:45pm and we arrived at the airport around 4:10. Dikesh was kind enough to meet us at the airport (with marigold garlands for us to wear – unfortunately, security took them) to say goodbye. Gia was with him, so it was a pleasant surprise to be able to say goodbye to her.

Passing through security into the airport was easy and then check-in at the Korean Airlines counter was equally easy. We decided not to check our bags for this trip and then headed through passport control and to the airport lounge to await our 7:20pm departure to Seoul.

The flight to Seoul left a little late but we had a long layover in Seoul, so no concerns. We left around 8pm, moved our clocks forward three hours and 15 minutes to try and start getting our internal clocks adjusted to Eastern Time in the US.  I was hoping we’d sleep for around two hours on this flight. I was able to do that, Sandy only slept for around 20 minutes. I watched both Twister movies and Sandy watched the movie Paris Can Wait. The flight was right around six hours and we arrived in Seoul at 5:15am. We spent the time in Seoul at one of the airport lounges that our credit card allows access to and had some food.

Our Seoul flight left pretty much on time – a departure at 9:30am on Thursday morning. We moved our clocks backward 14 hours. The goal for this flight was to get at least seven hours of sleep. I ended up with about six and Sandy ended with about two. Sandy watched four more movies (Inside Out 2, Joika, Memory, and The Upside). I read quite a bit. The flight was roughly 13 hours and we landed in Detroit around 8:45am. Clearing customs was easy enough and we headed right to our connecting flight, which had just started boarding when we got there.

The Detroit flight left on time (although takeoff was delayed a little because of de-icing in the light snow that was falling) for the two-hour flight to Tampa and we landed in Tampa shortly after 1pm. It was pretty nice to look out on the Florida landscape after having been away since February. My mom and Aunt Terry were there to greet us and it was, of course, fantastic to see the two of them.

We stopped at Cracker Barrel for breakfast on the way home, picked up Little Red at my mom’s house, went grocery shopping and settled into our AirBnB home, for the next month, in Sarasota. It’s been an incredible year of exploration, but it’s really nice to be back in a familiar location. We have lots of planned visits and things to do here in the US over the next eight weeks. We don’t plan to blog during our time here in the States, but we will be back out on our global adventure in mid-January and we’ll start journal entries again at that time.