I'm kind of surprised that I stepped on a plane again so soon, considering all the craziness last October! Having the option to hop on a space-available flight is so awesome, though! (When it works out in our favor!) Commercial tickets back to the States can be quite pricey, but we have the opportunity to fly right out Misawa straight to Seattle for under $30 a ticket. Last time, I traveled with the boys while in my second trimester and without Matt. Never again (hopefully!!) This time, he came along too, which bumped our category to a 2. They offer seats based on category priority, and a 2 is great! We flew out of Misawa on Tuesday morning without a problem. Getting back home didn't work out quite as planned, though. We arrived in Seattle on Saturday night, just in time for check-in (I think that happens at 10:30pm.) It turns out there were only a couple of seats available for the flight that night (actually, early Sunday morning) but we thought we had a pretty good chance. You have to wait around a few hours for the roll call to see if you get a seat. There were a lot of duty-related passengers that night that needed seats, so it turned out that we didn't get on. Yuck! So we lugged the boys and our junk to a hotel room at 2am and tried to figure out our week. There are flights from Seattle to Yokota AB (near Tokyo) on Monday and Wednesday nights as well as a flight to Korea on Friday nights before the next weekly flight to Misawa. Matt had exactly enough leave to extend through Friday, but then that was it. He had to get back home, with or without us! We showed back up at the terminal on Monday night (at least we got some rest for two days in Seattle!) even though they told us that the flight was overbooked. They do account for some no-shows, so they encouraged us to try any way. Thankfully, we got seats to Yokota! That meant landing in Japan Tuesday morning and then making our way up to Misawa. We had to take our two suitcases, two toddlers, two carseats, stroller, and carry-ons (ahem! I'm 29 weeks pregnant!) on a base bus, then do a little walking (maybe 30 minutes at our slow pace) to get to the train station. Along the way we passed a Black Cat courier service and decided to have our two suitcases delivered to us at our house the next day (for only 3,300 yen total!) It was just too much to carry, especially on all the trains. We had the nicest lady help us from the terminal to the train station. I don't know how we could have done it without you, Julie!! She rolled a suitcase (with Rhino riding on top of it) and carried one of our huge car seats the whole way for us. We took the hour-long train trip from Fussa to Tokyo Station, where we got on the bullet train (shinkansen) to Hachinohe, where we caught another short train to Misawa. It was quite a long day of travel! The boys were fantastic, though tired after a 10 hour flight and 5 hours on the trains. But we made it home Tuesday evening! Matt had extended his leave out through Friday, so we were able to recuperate the rest of the week. I love that we can fly Space-A, but I don't think we'll be doing it again any time soon. I am pretty sure I won't be getting on another airplane until the Air Force makes us to move!!