We are on Canadian soil!

Yes, we made it home after a very long 2 flights. By the way JENNIFER, I tried calling you when I got home but you didn't answer your phone...did you notice the missed call???? Gee whiz, I can tell she misses us, can't you?

So just to keep everything updated, Sunday morning 5 of us and Charles' little girl squashed into Nasser's car for the last time and headed to Kampala. We went shopping for last minute gifts for people and then with Chandra and Taddeo we all headed out to Entebbe. Well, contrary to what I had been told, there were no rooms available in the city and to top it off, there had been no power there for 3 days. We checked out some different guest houses and finally settled on two that could house all of us.

The house that Jen and I stayed at had a restaurant so I had my last Ugandan meal there...matooke to keep me strong, rice and beef. It was a typical Ugandan meal. First we asked what there was because it was obvious they didn't have everything on the menu. The choices were fish and beef, matooke and rice. I asked, "You don't have chicken?" "No."

We weren't ready to order so a few minutes later another server came and I asked what they had for snacks. One of the options was chicken! It's all so confusing. So Jen and I ordered chicken...then 5 minutes later we were told there was only one plate of chicken left, so I ended up with beef.

The lady at the guest house assured us that we'd have breakfast ready for us at 6am. And we were thankful that power came on that evening when we got back from dinner. BUT when we woke up, no power. Boo hoo! We got up and walked around to the front of the house...no lights, no sounds, no movement. We knocked on the door..nothing. Louise arrived outside the gate but it was locked and no sign of the guard. So she called the lady and she finally woke up and let Louise in and gave us money back for not having breakfast ready.

Then our van pulls up to take us to the airport, only in typical Uganda fashion, it was not the van we had yesterday as we had arranged, it was a car. For 8 of us and 4 suitcases to travel in. Of course this would happen! I texted Chandra the news and according to Carli (she told me later on) they had a good laugh together when they read my text and said, "Yep that sounds like a typical morning for Erin!"

Then we drove to the airport (we called another car for Carli and Chandra). The taxi driver tried to charge us 15,000 shillings for a 10 minute drive! Charles managed to bargain him down to 10,000 thank goodness cuz that's all I had...and that had been borrowed from Jen already!

Then I had my last samosas that I will ever have...I am samosa'd out. We said our goodbyes to our friends including Jen, who has been crowned the winner of Survivor Uganda...(but she doesn't win any money, too bad).

The first flight was fairly uneventful. We were lucky that two seats across the aisle from us were free so Carli was able to sit near us and I ended up sitting next to her cuz my TV broke. It was stuck on a really bad radio station and I couldn't change the channel or turn down the volume. Of course I would get the broken TV.

We panicked a bit getting to the next plane because our flight was a bit late and we only had an hour in between, but we made it in good time. In good time to sit and wait and die of heat exhaustion. Don't let anyone tell you Africa is hot...London is soooo much hotter. And as we sat on the plane waiting for the plane traffic to clear, the air conditioning breaks. And because I had the window seat my legs started to burn because of the heat flowing through the vent in the wall. I think we sat there for an hour with our pants rolled up, fanning each other with our safety manuals, until they managed to fix it. That was rough.

Another fairly uneventful plane ride after that though. No turbulance, it was very nice. Then we had to wait in a really long line up at customs which made us really restless especially considering our flight was delayed by almost 2 hours. Luckily we got our bags really quickly and made it out to our families. My parents and best friend were there to meet me and we went for Thai food.