Leaving on a Jet Plane...from hell!!!!

Tuesday, August 12th at 5:30 pm our adventure began.  After packing up all our stuff, we had 11 suitcases and 5 carry ons.

Look at all those bags!!!  I can't believe we dragged all those plus our four kids half way around the world and survived!!!  But we did!

My little travel girls ready to go.  These two were fantastic....most of he time!  What can you expect on a 37 hour flight?  I wanted to have a melt down every two hours! So the fact that they didn't is pretty good in my book!

Here's the guy we were most worried about going into this trip...with good reason!  Will did prove to be the hardest to manage on such a long flight.  But still manageable :)

Here we all are one last time in front of our house on 11 McGillivray Crescent!  What an adventure it was! I truly did love that place!  

 Good bye house! Good bye Kal!

From there it was off to the Kalgoorlie Airport to begin our first leg of the journey.  I was over whelmed by the amount of people who came to wish us well and say farewell.  I wish I had a group photo.  But I can still see them all waving behind the glass partition that separated us once we went through the gate.  The TeWhatu's, the Armstrong's, the King's, the Tomlinson's, the Silipa's, the missionaries, just to name a few!  They waved and waved til we got on the plane.  Oh how I love the people of Kalgoorlie!

Here's the only pic we got, with the Neil and Giselle Armstrong.  Such great people!

Then we were off! The Kalgoorlie to Perth flight was just dreamy!  If only we could have just stopped there!  The flight staff were so incredible and nice.  The in flight entertainment was awesome.  They even fed us and that was delicious!

Lily and Ava already engrossed in a show.

Will was in heaven!  It was pretty cute!

When the Qantas staff found out how far we were going with four kids they were beside themselves!  So they gave us free passes to their Qantas Lounge which was absolutely wonderful!  They had this great children's area, all you can eat food bar, complete with a huge jar of jelly beans, and all you can drink booze, if you were a drinker....which I was seriously contemplating becoming for the next 36 hours!  Just kidding!!  But seriously, this lounge was a life saver!! Especially since our flight got delayed and it turned out to be our longest layover.

Here's the children's area.  So great!

The girls made many trips to the food bar...all you can eat jelly beans!  Dream come true!

Lily opened the going away present her teacher gave her.  It was this great book.  We will miss our Kalgoorlie community!

So the flight was delayed and our kids fell asleep like a half hour before we had to get up and go to the boarding gate!  Seriously??  They just couldn't hold out!

So on the flight to Sydney, we all got quite a bit of sleep!  Thank goodness!

We made it to Sydney!  We were all feeling pretty rested!  I just couldn't believe that we still had the worst part of the journey ahead of us!  That dreaded 15 hour flight!  It is death!!!!  But for now we were just chilling in the Sydney airport.  Where we had to go through customs and they almost didn't let our little Aussie Sofie out of the country!  They claimed she didn't have a visa, but I knew I added her to ours!  So with a little digging they found it!  Phew!

Sofie was such a dreamy little traveller!  Couldn't of asked for a better baby to travel with!

Our whole time in Australia and this was our only view  of Sydney!  Sigh, how sad!!!

On the plane again!!  We were in it for the long haul!!!  Luckily, we all got some sleep again.  The girls were stellar.  Will was unsettled, but it was manageable.  Over half way through the flight, one of the flight attendants came over to me and said, "I have a $250 champagne bottle opened and I'm going to pour you a glass, because there is no one on this flight who deserves it more than you!"  Oh, I was really contemplating becoming a drinker now!!!  But I politely declined :)

About 50 million bathroom trips with a two year old to a tiny bathroom, one really smelly diaper from Sofie who never has smelly diaper later we made it to LA, which was by far the worst and most painful part of our trip! From the minute we landed, I felt homesick for Australia.  They were all so nice to us, but at LA, they were all so rude!!!

Anyways, after we got our 11 bags and 5 carry ons all on carts, we needed Lily to help push one, but of course, this is the time she chooses to have a meltdown!  Airport staff is yelling at us, Will is asleep and or stroller didn't make it through (which Cory just got a call from Qantas saying they have our stroller 2 months later!)  so it was quite stressful!  We gotta go through customs and his airport is absolutely packed full of people!  I couldn't believe how busy it was! We didn't know where to go either.  So we split up...terrible idea!!  But Cory took the girls and I just had to sit and wait with Will and Sofie and our luggage...sounds simple enough, right?  Will pushed the emergency stop button on the escalator!!  The little punk!!!  Ah, it was so stressful!  But finally Cory came back an we found where we needed to go. Anyways we finally made it to a spot to sit down for a bit so I took the girls to change clothes and get refreshed a little...well I lost Ava!  She decided she was done changing and left the bathroom!  Ah!!  It was so scary because seriously, there were so many people!!!  Luckily, she had been found by airport staff who helped her find me!  Then we had to be bused to the actual terminal we needed to be at.  We finally got there, and once again the flight was delayed.  So we waited there for a while, but at least there were less people and it was quite peaceful.  I seriously couldn't keep my eyes open!  It was terrible!  Cory was asleep also, so we were lucky we didn't get robbed or any of our kids kidnapped!

We finally boarded the last flight in our four flight journey and thankfully it was only one hour!!!  Yay!!  We were so close to home and I couldn't believe it!!!  It was so exciting!  Will, Ava and Sofie slept through the entire thing.  I know God was looking out for us the whole way and that is the only way we survived!  And it was a million times better doing it with Cory than without him!!!  Even if we did have an additional child!

Salt Lake International Airport!!!  Hallelujah!!!!  We're home!  We're home!

Sofie meeting Grandma and Grandpa Rappleye for the first time!

This post, just like that trip feels like it took forever!  So if you made to the end, congratulations!!