Day 53-beer and cheese party: OK, we will go home

   February 26-Our short naps came to a close around 1am when Sally's alarm went off.  It was time to get up and party!  We have a small group of friends in Gunnison with whom we get together occasionally during the winter for "beer and cheese parties."  It just seems like the perfect thing to do on a cold, dark winter evening.  The group got together on Saturday evening and asked us to join them via Skype.  Since we are seven hours ahead of Colorado, that meant that we, unfortunately, would have to be the late night attendees.
   Since the couples in the beer and cheese gang have kids who are some our kids' best friends, Sally woke up the girls when the revelers called in around 1:30.  She tried to wake up Spencer a couple times as well, but he just rolled back over and went back to sleep.  While he was the least groggy of us the next morning, he was quite upset when he found out that we had talked to everyone and he hadn't.  Sally and I popped a couple beers and we pulled out a little cheese for a heavy, late night snack.  That was about the extent to which we joined the party, though, because the kids hogged the iPad almost the entire time.
   The kids finally signed off a little before 3am and we adults got a chance to talk.  However, our neighbor from downstairs came up at that point and asked us to keep it down!  We apologized to her later on and she is not upset with us at all.  She just had a sick kid, who
could hear us, so that was the problem.  In any event, Sally felt kind of bad after that and headed to bed.  I talked to the guys at the party a little longer, but it sounds like there is not much to report in Gunnison.  Besides being mild and dry, it is pretty much like any other February.  So, I signed off and hit the sack.  That's the latest any of us have "partied" in a long time. 
   Once everyone rolled out of bed later in the morning, we had a quiet day at home.  Spencer
watched a lot of TV.  The girls read books and worked on math that their classes are doing back in Gunnison.  Sally and I got caught up on some work as well.  The girls and I took a short hike to the tunnel under the road once the rain let up late in the afternoon. 
   Alex was feeling a little homesick after having talked with her friends during the night.  She had also noticed that there was a new couple at the beer and cheese party and fretted that we were being replaced.  Since we have no return tickets to go home, she wanted us to see about that.  We had a number of reasons to originally purchase only one-way tickets to come over here.  First and foremost, we were very unsure about our schedules over here, so we were not sure when we should fly back.  We now know that the girls are in school through May and that we have our apartment through July, so Sally can teach more classes here and still have time to do research.  Second, the cost of round-trip international tickets is basically the cost of the two one-way tickets, so there was no price advantage to purchase round-trip tickets rather than one-way tickets.  Finally, IcelandAir is beginning direct flights between Denver and Reykjavík in May and we could not get round-trip tickets that included that leg when we were looking last fall.  That direct return flight really interested us.
   I had been checking the cost of flights back to Denver occasionally and they had not changed much, so there had been no real impetus to make a final decision and buy tickets.  However, when we checked it today, they were a little more expensive, except for the flight on July 29.  When we checked the flight that day, we were surprised to find that the cheap tickets were actually in the business class section!  Cheaper tickets almost exactly when we were looking to go home that include meals, beer, and larger seats?  We could not see a downside in any of that so we decided to pull the trigger.  Yep, in case anyone (like Alex) was concerned that we might be staying here forever, worry no more!  Who knew that all it would take to make us miss the U.S. enough to want to come home was beer and cheese (and friends, too, of course).  The plane takes off at 4:45 pm (local time) and arrives in Denver at 6:40 pm MDT.  Ignoring that pesky issue of time change, we will be "home" only two hours after leaving Iceland!