Homeward Bound

Our morning began bright and early when we all had to be on the bus at 5:45am. Very painful, Zach didn’t exactly jump out of his bed and we had to prod him along to get up and dressed. It was our least crazy airport trip, no gate changes or any confusion. The gate was downstairs in the holding pen, very 3rd world, no loudspeaker announcements, just a woman with a bullhorn and a horde of people waiting to get on a bus to shuttle out to the plane. 5 families from AWAA were on the flight, one poor family had to deal with a sick child. Little Levi got sick, out of every which opening on his little body as they waited to go through security. By the time the Pinkman’s left for the USA he had a fever and was still ill. We watched their plane sit on the runway for over an hour and I felt their misery for them.

Before we landed in Beijing we were stuck in a little bit of a holding pattern. No biggie, Zachary was squealing with the need to use the bathroom though! Got all of our bags, one of the boys in the group had a lost piece of luggage so we waited to figure out that situation. Zachary wants you to know it was a lost sword that he had bought in Guangzhou. No big deal, we have to wait until 6:30pm for this next flight.We all check our paperwork and figure out that we must head off to terminal 2, schlep all of our luggage on to the hot sticky wasteland of a bus. Compared to the beauty of the terminal (prepared for the Olympics), we were in the low rent part of the airport. Guess what, wrong terminal got to go back to Terminal 3. Let’s put our luggage on the elevator to go down and out. I get on with the kids and some luggage. Chris waits for the next elevator, puts the bags on and is holding the door with his elbow, the door shuts anyway. Mr. Ugly American comes to town and kicks the steel doors as he yells out in frustration. Then he comes barreling down the escalator, calling for all hands on deck. All the adults scattered to the 4 different levels. Finally, Linda ended up finding the luggage. Haul it all back on the stinky sweaty shuttle bus and ride back to the mecca of Terminal 3. So much for thinking that we will have hours and hours of boredom as we wait for our 6:30pm flight to Dulles.

The flight is almost over, I think we have about an hour to go before we land. At this point we have been up for about 25 hours. Sleeping, if you can really call it that on the airplane doesn’t really count as sleeping. Compared to the food on the China domestic flights the food offered on this United flight has been delicious. Ahhh! Good airplane food, we missed it so. The other part of inflight service we were loving was the ice in the cups. Ahhh! Just divine! No business class this time, but we were fortunate enough to be bumped up to “economy plus”, a little more leg room then the normal economy. Not too bad though, we are just ready to be done.

Oh yeah….they are getting ready to tell me to turn this thing off!!!!! I can feel that we are heading downward. Yeah….Baltimore here we come!! 40 minutes until arrival, that is about 30 minutes earlier then the original timeline. See you all soon!

---Susanne