Travel Insanity

Things have been a whirlwind of activity for our family over the past month!  On June 26th, the girls and I drove up from Corona to Draper, UT by ourselves.  We made great time (we left at 4:30 am PST and arrived at 4:30 pm MT) and the girls were really well behaved.  We spent the rest of the day and the next day recovering.  Then at 6:00am on Monday, June28th, a car picked us up at Nathan's mom's house to take us to the SLC Airport.  The girls and I flew to NYC for an event to raise awareness and money for the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.  (If you want to hear more about our trip, you can see pictures and read all about it in my 2 posts I wrote about the event: Post #1, Post #2.) 

We stayed for one night and left for the airport immediately after the event at 2:30 pm the next day, exactly 23 hours after we had arrived in NYC!  The girls had a predictably rough flight home, but we all survived to tell about it.  This is what a 3.5 year old looks like after attending the funnest party on Earth, and then spending multiple hours in the Newark Airport and 5 hours on an airplane:

We got back to Nathan's mom's house at about 10pm on Tuesday, June 29th, and then I spent June 30th recovering and repacking.  On Thursday, July 1st, I left for the SLC airport again, flew to San Francisco where I had a quick layover and switched from Delta to Japan Airlines and discovered I had been upgraded to business class for my flight from San Francisco to Tokyo.  It was the best surprise ever.  I figure it was karma repaying me for having so calmly survived the 11-hour drive from California to Utah, the two 5-hour flights to and from NYC, and staying in a small hotel room with the girls, all by myself.

I arrived in Tokyo at about 3:45pm on Friday, July 2nd, and took the Airport Limousine bus into the city where I met up with Nathan.  We spent that evening in a hotel and then moved to our friends', the Smith's, home for the remaining 4 nights of our stay.  We had an amazing visit in Tokyo.  It was so nice to go back.  We both have missed Japan a lot, but realized being there that we had missed it even more than we had realized!  Despite the fact that many of our friends were out of town, we still managed to see quite a few dear friends, have tons of fun, eat tons of our favorite yummy foods, and generally take advantage of our short time in Tokyo.

On Wednesday, July 7th, we left to return to the US on separate flights.  Nathan was lucky and had a direct flight, getting back in the early afternoon.  I flew to LAX where I had a 5-hour layover in the horrible Delta domestic terminal, and then flew the rest of the way to SLC, getting in that evening.  We spent the next 5 days enjoying time with Nathan's family.  Nathan's sister Misha was in town with her 2 little ones, which was really fun because we got to meet her new beautiful baby boy! 

We drove back to Corona on Tuesday, July 13th, and have spent the past week and a half trying to catch up and recover from the insane amount of travel we have all done.