This morning, just Thomas, Van Dyke and I went for tea and Nepali donuts before meeting everyone else at breakfast back at the hotel. We didn't have anything planned for the day, so some of us just wandered around Durbar Square looking at various shops and using up the last of our rupees. We met for lunch in the square but the news of our Dubai-Newark flight being canceled put a bit of a damper on the mood. Van Dyke spent the rest of the afternoon making calls and trying to find another solution. Meanwhile, the rest of us packed and did what we could to help till we finally left for the airport. When we got there, the airline tried to tell us that they had no record of our Dubai-Newark flight being canceled so they wanted to send our checked bags straight to Newark! In the end, we ran out of time to keep waiting for the airlines to sort it out. So, we boarded our flight hoping that our checked bags would be waiting for us in Dubai. The flight itself was relatively seamless and thankfully we were able to pick up our checked bags at the Dubai airport! But, since our flights weren't connected, we had to take a taxi over to the correct terminal. Since we were technically leaving the airport then, they did a more thorough look at our checked bags and gave us a hard time about the Nepali knives some of us bought to bring back with us. Thankfully, they let us off with a warning and we were on our way. After getting back through security, we barely had enough time to grab a quick bite to eat before boarding the plane. It was a welcome surprise when we realized that we had gotten the bulkhead seats with extra legroom for our 14 hour flight. Overall, I think sleeping on this flight was more successful than last time so we weren't nearly as groggy when we landed in New York City. Blake's family met him at the JFK Airport and Travis caught a flight from there back home. So Van Dyke, Giraldo, Thomas, Cai and I met Jeremy Freimark and one of Messiah's 15-passenger vans at a pickup spot to take us all back to Messiah. I don't remember much of the carride back because I slept most of the way but once we got back to Messiah, we unloaded a few of the tools we brought back with us and officially called it a wrap.
Final tea count: 318 with Travis, Thomas, and I hitting our individual goal of 50 teas
