Conference 09...The Journey Home (Sort of)

Get a load of that face!



You guessed it...it was time for us to head home to our regularly scheduled lives.



The trip came to a close way too soon...



At the same time, I was so eager to get back to Troy and Patrick.



We returned the rental car, crossed the street for the terminal...

Checked in our luggage and waited for our flight home.

The End....



Not really! Our flight was not going to be allowed to land in San Francisco because of the bad weather there. They delayed it SO long, that when our connecting flight to Tokyo was boarding...we were still sitting in Salt Lake City waiting to board. We gave up and opted for the hotel voucher. They put us up at the Airport Residence Inn, since we had to be back at the airport at 6 AM the next day. What ever would we do with another day in Salt Lake City?



Take a party Suburban into the city...that's what!!!



Do you think maybe Coree had something to do with this? She just might have!

Our first stop....here:



Where we promptly went to get some lunch, here:



Which was even yummier than these pics, here:















Then, since we still had room in our carryons, we spent a significant amount of time, here:

(What I failed to get was a pic of my favorite stop, Sur La Table, which you can visualize on the lower left of Barnes and Noble. If you look really hard, you can see some of the goodies in the window. I almost left with a delicious lasagna pan...but I had a premonition of it breaking on the plane, so I abstained.)



After some Tomfoolery in the fountain, we headed here:

And turned the kids loose on the new iMacs while Cliff and I played with the iPhones.















Ummm...we're so proud.



By now we were getting hungry again, so of course we stopped at Ben and Jerry's.

We were running out of ideas by now...when I remembered Coree was supposed to be thinking about getting her ears pierced on this trip. (In Japan, they do it at Dr's offices out in town. I wasn't eager for an ear-piercing Dr. visit.) She admitted to not actually having thought about it at all. I encouraged her to try again, since maybe we were delayed for just such an occasion as this. We took her into Claire's...just to "talk" about it with the technician. She knew her stuff and had Coree sweet talked into her lair in no time!

And it went a little something like this:























Coree was SO thrilled...I knew she would be once she got past the fear of the pain.

It was a pretty sweet bonus day, I must say that. Sometimes in life, we are thrown curve balls that are SO much better than plan "A"!