The Last day in Australia. We are heading home. We packed up all our luggage including the extra duffle bag we bought to carry stuff we collected along the way. At 9:30 Sunday morning we are headed for the airport. Our plane was scheduled to leave in the early afternoon but we wanted to make a couple of quick stops along the way.
We stopped at Manly, one of the many beach communities we had visited while in Australia, to pick up some T-shirts and to walk along the beach for a while before we head back to the U.S. 
There was a open-air craft market going on so we browsed through the tables a bit and then went for a walk along the beech. 
Eventually we had to actually leave and head to the airport.
One last look at what we were leaving behind. 
For one brief moment there was a mixed feeling that we might not get to the airport in time and would have to stay in Australia a bit longer, but the traffic eventually cleared and we had to go on to the airport anyway. 
We got to the Airport checked out baggage and had an emotional good bye with Clarice and Jon.
We got on the plane and took off about 3:30 PM Australian time. The flight took us up and over Sydney and gave us some pretty good views of the beaches to the north. We flew right over Manly beach where we had been just a couple of hours before. If you look closely you can almost see the people still on the beach.
It was about a 13 hour, bumpy flight to LAX. We had to clear customs in LA so we had to go through baggage claim and then re-send our baggage on for the rest of the trip. We had about a two hour layover in LA. We had a four hour flight to Chicago and another two hour layover in Chicago plus a delay in departing a half hour flight to Fort Wayne landing about 11:15 Fort Wayne time, and not quite an hour recovering our baggage and getting out of the airport. We got to the lake about 1:30 AM on the 20th. We traveled about 24 hours between 3:30 PM and 11:30 PM on Sunday. It was a long day.
I will conclude with this note. I took about 7500 digital pictures and Jon added a few hundered to fill in things I had not picked up. We were gone about 32 days, and about 4 or 5 of those days were pretty well consumed by traveling. I put 15-20 pictures on each days report of the trip so there may be 300-400 pictures reflected in this mid September to mid October journal. I hope this gives a small glimpse of what we saw and did.
Jay
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