My World Traveler

Our quiet-as-a-mouse, homebody, not-quite-17-year-old has left the country for a full year! She is going to be a foreign exchange student through a Rotary Club sponsorship. We never thought she'd go through with it! She is going to be living with a family of seven in northern Germany in a little town called Dulmen. The dad is an IT specialist, the mom is a stay-at-home mom, and there are five boys ranging in age from 17 to 4 years old. The 17 year old is going to be a foreign exchange student in Mexico this year, so Logan gets his private room and bath. The next oldest boy is 13, so she also inherits the position of oldest child.

Logan left for Germany yesterday afternoon. Three hours later one of the kids tells us that Logan is on the phone. Uh, oh. That's not good news! Her 90-minute flight from Nashville to Washington, DC was nearly two hours late, so she missed her connection to Frankfurt. This was her first time to fly -- in fact to ever travel alone by any means. She had to take the next flight to Germany which left five hours later. She called to ask us to contact her host family because she couldn't figure out how to enter the access code the airline gave her plus the phone number to Dulmen. Well, it was currently 1 am in Germany, so they didn't answer. I emailed them hoping for the best. Fortunately they did check their email before leaving for the one-hour drive to the airport, so they were spared the early-morning commute since her original arrival time was 7 am. Today the host family was very nice and had Logan call us instead of emailing us to tell us she'd arrived safely.

We will certainly miss her! She doesn't return home until mid-July, just two weeks short of a full year. She also doesn't come home for Christmas break, and the Rotary Club has a two-week European tour set up for the exchange students during Easter break. If we can arrange babysitting, we may just have to fly to Germany around Christmas.