Day 8: Home, Sweet Home!

5:45 p.m. EST and local time
Saturday, 03-10-07
Welcome home! As I rounded the corner in the corridor of the Atlanta airport, I saw a familiar face I had been longing to see since departing from Cyprus, she was my beautiful girlfriend. I ran to her with the weight of the two bags on my shoulders and hugged her. I was definitely home. As the rest of the team came towards baggage claim, we were all met with familiar faces of family, friends and loved ones. Love was now the universal language all around us, and I absolutely loved every moment of it. Our time together as 19 friends had now ended, but ended incredibly stronger. We will take with us so many new faces and unforgettable memories with us from this journey together, and we will do so wanting to tell everyone each individual detail about them. As I walked with my girlfriend to her car, I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that I had just traveled home from the complete other side of the globe. I thought about how thankful I was for the opportunity and how much I’m going to miss my time there in Turkey and Cyprus. Maybe I’ll go back, all or some of us, and maybe I’ll get to relive those memories with my new local friends or family that might tag along the next time around. But there was no maybe about it, all 19 of us were forever changed, and definitely for the better. We were home, but we will never forget our new home that formed in a week on the streets of Istanbul and the beaches of Cyprus on the other side of the world.