2023 - Day 9 & 10 - Our Last Day and the Adventure Home

Because our flights were cancelled the day before, the students had the opportunity to sleep in on Saturday and hang out at the house, while Senora Harrison and I (Clausen) went to the airport to work on fixing our flights. Unfortunately, we were at the airport for over 8 hours and nothing changed. Because Delta shopped out our flights to United, we were unable to do name changes, which meant some students would have to fly home without a chaperone. Thankfully our parents were very supportive and trusting in our leadership, because this was obviously not the ideal plan for anyone. 

While we were at the airport a group of 14 kids went with BT and Ronny to his Saturday men's league game - Talon even got to play! From our understanding he "sold" when he was on Ronny's team, but when he switched to the other team he started scoring." After the game, Ronny took them to the mall to get Starbucks and they ran into a kid from one of our clinics earlier in the week! He recognized our kids and came up to them and said hi! So cool! The other 3 kids and Mrs. Timmer stayed home - the boys played on the soccer field with Axiel (one of the farm workers kids) and Ronny's brothers for HOURS (don't ask us if they put on sunscreen)...

We got all got back to the house at the same time, packed up our bus, and headed over to the hotel that Delta provided for us. While it was nice to be in a hotel with unlimited hot water, the reality that we would not be doing much sleeping at the hotel. We went to Denny's with the coupons provided by Delta, then came back to the lobby to check in about the game plan for the next day. Unfortunately when we went to check in and pay for all of our kids bags we were made aware that the flights changed AGAIN. It was a mess. Some of our kids were on flights all by themselves, some were not scheduled to come home for another week, so Mrs. Timmer, BT, and I stayed up for hours more trying to get all of our kids home. 

Our shuttle left on Sunday morning at 3 AM, so after a maximum of 2 hours of sleep, or none for many of the kids, we headed over to the airport. Unfortunately more issues with flights and tickets and miscommunication between Delta and United continued. We were able to get everyone on a flight home though, and no one would travel completely by themselves. 

Thus began the journey of five different legs of flights to get home to Arizona. Our group stayed in communication through the Band App and our students did an awesome job staying in touch with the group and letting us know when every flight landed and when they boarded the next one. 

This was definitely a very trying day for all of us, students and chaperones, but we all ended up safe at home sometime between 2 PM and midnight. Praise God. 

I want to extend a huge thank you to all of our students for having the best attitudes that they could - I know there was a lot of frustration (from me too), but for the most part they kept things pretty positive, knowing that we had no control over the situation. 

I also want to thank our parents for not only being super encouraging, but trusting in us as chaperones. This was not an ideal situation at all, but having our parents trust and support meant a lot to us and allowed us to focus on getting everyone home. 

Now it's time to work on a lot of refunds and credits from Delta :)

Please read the next post to hear all of our kids final thoughts and reflections on the trip.