Report on the Journey Home

Email April 9, 2020

Hey everybody, this is an extension of my last email because I thought it would be fun to let you guys know how "fun" of a trip it was from my apartment in Comodoro allllllll the way up to Salt Lake (because it is roughly 6,500 miles).

So first, we were in our apartment in the quarantine for about 17 days, from March 17 to April 2nd. And that sounds like a really long time, but it really flew by for some reason. Elder Peterson and I spent the days reading the scriptures, church talks, church books, and basically anything else in our apartment, we watched Meet the Mormons, 17 Miracles, and Ephraim's Rescue about four times each, we analyzed the Book of Mormon videos, we experimented with baking bread, we took naps, we did trivia with our district every night, we shared cool stories, called our families twice a week, and tried to keep in contact with the people we had been visiting before. It was a weird two weeks, but a good one, all things considered.

We get the call on Wednesday, April 1st that we're going home, and that was a REALLY great day to get it, definitely believed our zone leader right away. So the next day we finished up our packing, cleaned a lot, and gave away some food to our neighbor Rosa. 

Fun side story, in the call on April 1st we didn't know exactly when we were going to be leaving, so we needed our phone to hear when we were leaving. And so, OF COURSE, in the morning as we were contacting people, our phone froze on us. No problem, just pop the battery out and back in and start up the phone, right? Wrong. For the next four hours, we didn't have a phone, which was honestly the scariest thing because we just couldn't contact our leaders. So we broke Argentine quarantine law and ran to our Zone leader's house to let him know. We gave him the phone number of our neighbor so he could call us, and went home to wait anxiously and pray that our phone turned back on. Well, our neighbor popped on by and said that we were leaving at five, and so we said awesome, guess we'll wait until then. And then, about noon or so, we popped the battery in the phone just for fun and lo and behold, it turned on! So that was a stressful four hours.

And the worst of our adventures were not over yet! At five o clock, we took a taxi from our apartment to the mission office in Kilometers Tres and hung out there until about 9 when our double decker bus showed up. We said goodbye to President and Sister Camejo, and you could tell they were just heartbroken that we had to leave. I really hope we could go back soon...

  

Meeting at the mission home with President and Sister Camejo

Double decker bus that took us to the Buenos Aires airport

Then we were off! 

... Or so we thought. About twenty minutes outside of Comodoro, there was a police check. Travel between provinces is a little tough right now because of the quarantine, and so we needed an absurd amount of papers for our bus to make it all the way on the 24 hour bus ride up to Buenos Aires. We had all of those papers, so the police check let us through. About five minutes later, they apparently decided to not let us through, making us turn around and go back to the police check. We were there, I kid you not, from 10 at night to 1:30 in the morning. We found out that the only thing preventing us from going was the fact that the US Embassy gave us permission to leave back in March, and it was April. So we contacted the Embassy, they more or less ordered the Argentines to ley us through, and so they did... after more than three hours of waiting.

And thus we finally started our journey to Buenos Aires on a bus. After about four hours of sleep, I woke up at six o clock on  Friday the 3rd and started my journey of staying awake for 28 hours straight. I kid you not, I did not close my eyes for an extended amount of time until about 10 am the next day. There is no good reason for that except that missionaries are social creatures, especially after having no human interaction besides their companion for 17 days. And on the bus people were chatting with old companions, getting to know other missionaries, playing trivia, I amused everyone with a re-enactment of Ephraim's Rescue, and generally tried to pass the time without movies or smartphones. Surpsingly, the journey flew by somehow, I really have no idea how. We did not stop for food because we couldn't, but they had a few snacks for us on the bus.

On the bus. Elder Barrus is on the left in the glasses. 

Around midnight on the night of Friday/Saturday, we made it to the Argentina MTC, which has been empty since they closed it down earlier this year. They had around 500 missionaries when we arrived. They gave us masks there and a milanesa sandwich (not the best...) and then told us to wait until our plane left ten hours later. Reminder- at this point I had been awake for around 18 hours straight and somehow made it another 6 without dying. Anywho, they shoved us in a room with all the American missionaries from our mission and told us to wait. Around three in the morning, all the missionaries that live in states not named Utah left, and so there I said goodbye to my best, worst, and only companion in the mission field, Elder Peterson. It was a touching moment.

About two hours later, the American missionaries from Utah left the MTC to go to the Buenos Aires airport. We waited in a line outside of the airport for roughly an hour to an hour and a half (at this point I had been awake for a full day, so my times are a little sketchy) to be admitted to check our bags, go through TSA, Migrations, and then to actually go on the airplane. And then it was a twelve hour flight. Since it had been 28 hours since my last sleep, I popped in a melatonin and a half and slept for the next six or seven hours. It was a blissful sleep. 

Flight tracker 

Welcome to your Inter-mission!

Then I got home and have been enjoying quarantine life for the last week. 

If you managed to get to the end of this massive email, kudos to you. Let me know how you guys are spending your quarantine. Thanks for all your emails and support, I still think I'm going to go back on the mission as soon as this whole Corona virus thing allows, but I'll let you know if that changes.