The rest of the farewell voyage!

We finished our time in the States by traveling about 3000 miles by car and taking a flight out to St. Louis to visit our families. We started out in NY to see Ed's parents, Alanna, AJ, and the kids for a few days. Cameron and Hannah have grown even more and we had a great time visiting with everyone. This first trip to NY was short because we wrapped up our voyage again in NY.

Our next stop was WV and we stopped to visit Molly and Fred for a night on our way down to Huntington. Unfortunately, it was a short stop and we had to head out after Molly made us breakfast and gave us a quick tour of Morgantown. We spent a few days in Huntington, visiting the State Capitol building and going to a Marshall game while we were there.

While in Huntington, we decided that since we were only three hours away, we would make the trip down to Blacksburg and meet up with Matt and Rachel for the VT homecoming football game. We arrived a couple of hours before gametime, bought tickets from some guy on Price's Fork Road, drank some Miller Lite (gross!) at Matt's tailgate, then headed to our seats. We are old now and decided to get seats in the West stands where we would be able to sit down marking our first game with seats outside of the student section! Go Hokies!

We drove back to Richmond with Matt and Rachel and stayed at their apartment for a night before heading back to RI for Ed's 6 week post-op appendectomy appointment. Their apartment is awesome, right down in Shockoe Bottom with an excellent view of downtown Richmond. We spent a couple nights in RI before heading to St. Louis for the arrival of baby Alex! He was born at 11:05am on Oct. 10 and weighed 7lb, 11 oz. (a lightweight compared to me!). While we were in St. Louis Ed and I visited the Arch, went to a Mizzou game, and spent lots of time with Megan and Sparky (Scott's nickname for Sparkles the dog). We also got a chance to have a brief visit with Becky, Barb, and little William (Barb will get mad if I call him Willy...hehe).

After St. Louis, it was back to NY to drop Ed's car off, pick up Hokie, and have his parents drive us back to RI for our flight to Tokyo. It was an adventure but we made it to Japan with no issues. It was daylight for the entire plane ride and we had some nice views of the mountians over Alaska. There ends the voyage and next time we will let you know how we are settling in!