The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln is inching closer to home and on Wednesday stopped in Pearl Harbor for a port visit, the Navy said in a news release.

Lincoln left its previous home at Naval Station Norfolk April 1 for an around-the-world deployment and a homeport shift to Naval Air Station North Island near San Diego.

Within weeks, the flattop was rushed to the Middle East amid spiraling tensions with Iran, and wound up staying for seven months while its replacement, sister Nimitz-class aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman, was sidelined with an electrical glitch.

Truman left Norfolk Nov. 18 and arrived in the Arabian Sea in December.

Lincoln and its crew took a brief break before Thanksgiving with a port visit in Bahrain.

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“I am proud of all of the hard work and dedication shown by the entire crew throughout the deployment,” Capt. Walter Slaughter, commanding officer of Abraham Lincoln, said in a statement Wednesday. “Hawaii is a strategic, historic location that presents a well-deserved opportunity for rest and relaxation, and for the crew to honor the sacrifices of those who have gone before us during the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

Three guided-missile destroyers that left Norfolk with Lincoln returned there in early November. The Norfolk-based guided-missile cruiser Leyte Gulf, which left Norfolk in late March, returned to Norfolk on Saturday.

Courtney Mabeus-Brown is the senior reporter at Air Force Times. She is an award-winning journalist who previously covered the military for Navy Times and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., where she first set foot on an aircraft carrier. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and more.

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