Friday, Saturday (which disappeared in mid air ) and home Sunday

We are home!! Thank you all for supporting us and following the GSE Journey. So many wonderful friends and some great stories to tell. No doubt most of what we've seen and done will sink in when we work on the scrap books!

But now...well we are home! Cheryl and Wayne left mid morning Friday and flew to Auckland and then to Blenheim and Nelson respectively. Brent, Kate and Naomi made their way to Chicago's O'HAre airport late afternoon.

Wow, 26 hours flying: a 4.5 hour flight Chicago to LA, a 14.5 hour flight LA to Sydney, and a 3 hour flight Sydney to Chch. And about 40 hours in the same clothes! But lovely to see everyone at the airport, Our Rotary District Governor was there to greet us and Brent swept us his children one in each arm. Kate and Naomi's parents were there also, patiently waiting for the last three remaining passengers whose luggage hadn't quite followed them all the way through to Christhcurch.

We don't know how to begin to thank all the Rotarians and everybody who has made this Group Study Exhange possible. But from the bottom of our hearts we say thank you for this amazing adventure.

Thursday

Hi. Well we have many entries and details to fill you in on. Not least our visit to the Chicago Stock Exchange on Thursday, where we had a tour and were even taken onto the trading Floor by a Rotarian. Something like 70,000 sq feet of organised chaos, it takes ten hours to clean up all the paper each day, there are approx 150 trades in 30th (1/3 )of a second and 2 billion trades per year $1000 trillion.
An incredible experience, all the more poignant when we learnt of the chaos that hapened in the markets in the 12 hours following our visit.

Wednesday 8th

Rotary International, New Trier High School and the Bahai' Temple

Tuesday 7th October

As well as an incredibly interesting visit to a Charter school, we visited Frank LLoyd Wright's Unity Temple in Chicago.

Monday 6th

Among the highlights.... seeing Sue the Tyranasaurus Rex at the Field Museum...

Friday and District Conference at the Weekend

Sorry we have lost a couple of days, as you can imagine it has been really busy but absolutely fantastic and we promise to catch you up. But highlights include school visits, botanic gardens and seeing the Goodman Theatre.
But anyway this entry is all about Friday and the weekend....
Friday - we were up early with our bags all packed including additional suitcases.
And off we went to the Naval Academy to watch the graduation ceremony. This was a real treat as this is the only academy in the whole of the US for the entry level training for naval recruits. 936 graduated with a heap of wonderful pomp and pageantry and we witnessed it all from the dias, and apparently graduation occurs every week! It was a neat experience.



Then off we went to Lincolnshire and the Rotary District Conference. Its all a bit of a blur but we joined the Paul Harris Luncheon and then presented in the afternoon and then had pre dinner drinks with the District Governor before sitting down to dinner with the Inbound GSE Team who arrive in NZ from Illinois in April 2009.
Friday evening the kiwis enjoyed wine tasting and swing dance in the Hospitatliy Rooms before finally getting to bed about 2.00am ish.
Saturday was bliss, we wore mufti, caught some ZZZZ's, went shopping (oh and how we shopped!) and then got our sparkly outfits on for the banquet dinner. Oh and by gosh there was dancing!! Some latin dancers taught us salsa and meringue and swept us off our feet and we finally got to bed about 2.00am ish!
Up early Sunday and Cheryl and I went to Willowcreek which is best described as a mega church. Its 33 years old, and it was a fantstic experience. Normally a congregation of 7000, the 9.00am service was only 4500 (!), and included a full rock band and 11 piece orchestra. It was a wonderful service and suprisingly personal for something so big. Wayne, Brent and Kate, headed off for a game of 16" Soft Ball which is much like the name described but we'll let them tell you more later....
This afternoon, Wayne, Brent and Naomi got to meet Dan Seals, a Democrat Congressman trying for office and a close colleague of Barack Obama. There is a huge amount of support in this area for Obama and gosh its going to be interesting to see whats going to happen at the elections.
This is our last week and all of a sudden we feel like we want everything to slow down as we don't want this great trip to end and we definitely won't want to say goodbye to the wonderful friends we've met.

Thursday 2nd - High Tech - Zion Benton