Home Again!

As I type this, Kaylee is passed out in bed.  Her plane landed on time at 6:30 pm our time, we collected her luggage, then stopped at a Chick-Fil-A down in Indy, where we ran into a whole group of her friends and their parents who had gone on the trip with her.  Too funny.  She was excited and chatty and was telling us all about it, and then after she ate and we were getting ready to leave, she hit the wall, and started crashing.  It was after 2 a.m. in "her" time, even though it was only 8 pm our time.  She stayed up until after 9 pm our time, then hit the bed.  We'll try to wake her up not too late tomorrow morning to ease the transition back to Kokomo time.

She loved Switzerland the best, and Venice next.  She says she has to go back some day.  She bought chocolates from most of the countries she went to, but said Italy's chocolate wasn't so good and Switzerland's chocolate was the best by far.  She brought me some too.  :)  I looked through her photos, and she had some great shots, more than she sent us.  We'll have to copy them off in one spot so they exist someplace other than just her phone.  Trip of a lifetime for her, she really loved it.  She tried a bunch of new foods and liked almost all of them, she learned things about the various cultures, such as how you don't fill your own cup at a restaurant, you fill the person's next to you, oh, and you have to pay to go to the public bathrooms.  She said her mental note to self was to bring along more coins, because she just had dollars/euros and you needed coins to go to the bathroom, so she bought a souvenir just so she could get change and go to the bathroom.  ;)   They saw tons of churches, castles, climbed the mountain, did the gondola ride, had gellato (she says she'll never be able to enjoy ice cream the same way again), toured bombed cities in Germany and the concentration camp, so many things.  She said at one point at Dachau she realized that she was standing in the room where they stacked the bodies before disposing of them, and she had to leave.  There was a chapel room there, and they opened the door, and it was dark with candles lit in there, and she and some friends went in and prayed, and cried, and that the experience will stay with them.  They also discussed how in many places people are trying to pretend like the Holocaust is a fake...she said it was so important that they leave this available for people to see, that you cannot deny the Holocaust when looking at it, feeling it.

We rearranged her room and cleaned it up while she was gone, as well as Steve adding a cabinet and new sink and faucet to her bathroom, so she liked that, even if she was too tired to enjoy much of it yet.  So, the kid is home, and the trip was a resounding success.  :)