Flight Log

Written on the flight to Beijing - May 15, 2014, 9:35am (9:35pm in the U.S.)

It was a bumpy start indeed to our journey to China… but we are finally on our way! My super sweet Dad was up with us well before sunrise to drive us to the airport, about a 30 minute drive from our house.  We unloaded and said goodbye… and then the crazy began.

We didn’t expect the check-in line alone in Cincinnati to be 2 hours long… which left us not much time to make our flight to Chicago.  After getting through that mess (barely), we RAN to our gate after making it through security, and a few minutes later were boarding. We left the gate only to circle… and circle… and return back to where we started. The plane, it was determined, had failed a critical de-icing check, and so we would need to deboard the plane and figure something else out for ourselves. Thankfully, as we waited, United was able to locate an empty plane about to fly to Chicago anyway, so they took on all of our passengers and we were soon on our way.

Once finally in Chicago, we settled in a bit, got some food, and had a really cool opportunity to Facetime with the director of Canaan’s preschool so we could watch his end of the year program that we were missing. It was so cool to still be a part of this special event for him, and we even got to say hi and wave hello to our precious big boy. 

Not long after that we lined up along with a enormous mass of other people heading to Beijing, to get our papers checked (passports and visas) and get on the plane. We finally made it to the front of the line, only to find that there was some sort of problem with our ticket and we were pulled out of line. Because our first trip from Cincinnati to Chicago had trouble, there was evidently a lot of confusion because we were bumped off of our FULL flight to China by United (even though we made it to Chicago 4 hours before our Beijing flight was to leave).

After about 10 minutes of stressful waiting  (and pulling out the very true “we’re adopting our BABY, we HAVE to get on that plane” card), we somehow managed to get back in the manifest and we were good to go. Holy-whew!

The flight so far, despite my aching bad knees, the long flight itself hasn’t been too bad at all! We each have our own little tvs loaded up with tons of movies and tv shows. I was able to sleep about an hour, and at this point we have just about 5 ½ hours to go. We had no idea that our flight path would take us over Greenland – that was pretty cool as well!  Pretty sure we’re flying over Russia at the moment.

Update: We've landed safe! We're excited to get some sleep and see the Great Wall tomorrow! :)