Bloodshot eyes and 20,000 miles later, here I arrived back in my own little cranny of the world, my own room. 9 weeks without a phone, or a working clock, it feels rather comforting to be back home. The last 2 weeks of our NZ en devour we ended up staying at the same family farm one hour north of Auckland. Everything ran relatively smooth for the majority of the two weeks, except the family had two daughters, Denvah(7), and Khendra (10). They were just fine for a a few days, but after that, these girls' mission was to annoy us as much as possible, it seemed as if it was their gauge of enjoyment. Always stealing out belongings and hiding them, always taking the hats off our heads, stealing our food that we brought to the house, throwing my OJ in the garbage bin, the list could go on. We treated them really nice, and would go out and play "Spot Light" with them, their little game they made up. The night before we left the mom of the place got really angry at me because Khendra left the house to her in tears...the mom was yelling at me, telling me to grow up and act like an adult. I wonder what Khendra told her happened, because what did happen was they wouldn't stop asking Feigum for piggy-back rides, they said they wouldn't leave us alone until they got rides. So I says to them....I says "your mother wouldn't like to hear that, no friends over for 2 years (in a sarcastic, kind of joking tone). Khendra flipped out, got very angry and nailed me really hard with the television remote a few times ( this is just after they were holding knives up to us), then she bolted out the door in tears. This lead to the mother coming in and giving me a good yelling, and making me apologize. I was stunned. These little devils terrorized us all week, worse then any kids I've seen for portions of the day when they weren't at school, and now I had to apologize for it? That was hard to swallow. I wouldn't call it a negative situation, it really made things more interesting out there on the farm.
They dropped us off the next morning (june 21) at the bus stop, so we could get to our 7:30 PM flight in Auckland. We went to the library to burn some time then hopped on our 12 hour flight towards San Fransisco. We departed at 7:30 PM Saturday in NZ and landed 12 hours later at 12:15 PM Saturday, June 21. We had roughly 12 hours to burn until our 12:45 AM flight to Minneapolis. We toured Haight-Ashbury and Golden Gate Park and did a ton of walking, then came back to the airport to board our flight to MPLS. We took off at 12:40 AM and landed in MPLS at 6 AM on Sunday the 22nd of June. From there we hopped on the light rail towards downtown to hop on the Greyhound which would take us to Fargo. It said there would be a 7 o'clock bus and an 8:30. We all but gave up on the 7 o'clock bus, and took our sweet time getting there. Without never-ending string of luck we managed to stop 7 o'clocker just before it took off and got on. From 7:30 am- 1:00 PM today was the bus ride across Minnesota to finally get to downtown Fargo where Garrison gracefully swooped in with his Buick Park Avenue and picked us up. Home Sweet Home.

Back to the real world, still adjusting to being back, it feels quite different. Some sad news struck me tonight, when my folks came home they told me Cooper wasn't limping last month because of a torn ACL, but it turned out Coop had bone cancer. So when we went to go have surgery on his ACL, was when we got the bad news Cooper had cancer, so we had to put Cooper down, I am just happy that he lived such a happy and great life, I'm trying not to let it get me so down, he was just such an amazing dog, so smart it felt like he knew what you were thinking, a true companion. But he was in too much pain to go on, he lived 12 amazing years and we can all be happy for that. RIP Coop Dog.