Home, but not home.

October 26, 2012

We've arrived home, safe and sound, back to rainy Oregon with many autumn colors, our family & friends, pets, all of whom we love and adore.  Our hearts are overflowing with more than we could have imagined from our short adventure and family research project.  Thank you for staying in contact through our blog. You have read a few tidbits, gazed at a few pictures, but know that we have thousands more stories and pictures from the many unexpected joys, surprises and sorrows of our discovery. And we are not done. In many ways we have just begun because we did not finish our ancestry work in Istanbul and now have many new connections and promises we've made to new friends to return to.  We saw the sun rise as the plane left Istanbul and gained altitude over the Black Sea. The sun set over the U.S. midwest about 21 hours later, during the final leg of our trip home. We gained 10 hours, in addition to the daylight advantage of flying due west. That makes for a very long day. There was ample time to reflect on the past month's adventures, but it will take many weeks or more to digest our experiences. We have follow-up letters and emails to write to the many friends we made. Our family research continues, and we have new projects to work on, too, like helping Pavel and Nikolay in Odessa with their holocaust museum and helping to improve the little school in the poor Moldovan village of Baimaclia. Furthermore, I left part of my heart in Konya, Turkey. We will have to return to many of these places, perhaps making Vienna a home base for shorter trips to these relatively nearby destinations. In the meantime Andrea and I are returning to our respective occupations. I know I will be integrating my new insights with the purpose of my work here. We look forward to writing the sequel to this blog in the foreseeable future. Our lives are forever changed. 

The green Bosporus will forever be calling us back. 

Home in time for golden leaves and the red stalks of pineapple sage.