The Flight to Beijing

Our flight: United Airlines 0897. Nonstop from Dulles to Beijing.

The flight itself was scheduled to leave about 12:30pm, and we arrived at the airport about 10am. Royce and Thomas dropped us off at baggage check in...then had to leave. The whine and pounding from nearby construction was getting to Thomas, and too a quick goodbye seemed easiest for all involved.

Oh, it was so very hard to leave my big boy! Don't get me wrong, I will miss Royce too, but he is an adult, and can fully understand all of the whys of it. :)

Well, we were able to board the plane straight away. Our seats were 38H and J, which were an asile and center of row seat, respectively. Also in the row was a very kind lady who had the windowseat. She was/is a student, and was returning to China to visit her parents.

The departure from Dulles was delayed by almost 2 hours. The reason? The heat of the day had caused the fuel of the aircrat to expand and flow into an overflow tank. This itself was not an issue until the overflow tank itself overflowed, causing fuel to drip out onto the tarmack. Wheee!

Eventually, the fuel was drained off into other tanks and we were allowed to lealo. There really isn't any other words to describe the flight itself other than --- LONG!
And economy seating is...well, cramped. Mom and I managed to doze a little bit, but never for very long, and never deeply. Please understand, these are not complaints, I'm just trying to saw how it was!

But there were some cool things too -- in between movies, a screen would come up and show us various statistics about the trip: how long we had been in the air, what our current groundspeed was, etc. And a gps map type display, showing where our aircraft was at the time. Being away from the window, we really couldn't see much and the windows were kept shaded and the cabin dim to enourage people to sleep so they would be more acclimated to Beijng time. (Which is about 12 hrs ahead of US eastcoast time.) And our carryon bags went into a compartment overhead which made them difficult to get to... even so, I do regret not getting at least one picture of the ice as we flew over the north pole. Or the mountains in the siberian region as we flew over Soviet airspace. Sorry! I'll try not to slack off on the pictures in the future!

When at last we landed, we were able to find our bags fairly quickly, and made our way to the exit where our guide Veronica met us. She took us to an area to sit, as there was another family she was waiting for whos plane was due in about a half hour after ours.

An hour and a half later Veronica sent us to the hotel without the other family. There was no sign of them...and we weren't sure if they were having luggage issues, or had perhaps changed flights, or.....? Poor Veronica was very apologetic...but mom and I were not upset with her...just dead-dog tired, hungry, and wanting to be anywhere other than the airport!

Everyone at our hotel has been so kind and polite! Talk about your quality customer service! Mom and I had dinner here at the hotel and then crashed.... I'm writing this post at 2pm EST time, making it 2am Beijing time. My sense of time is completely messed up! After I finish this post, I'm going to try and sleep more... we have a full day of touring we arranged with Delight Travel, and I believe a peking duck dinner this evening. I hope to have at least a small sampling of pictures with the next post.

And the reason I created this blog, rather than posting on our original adoption blog? Well, I'm not sure exactly why, but I cant connect to the adoption blog at blogsome...or Livejournal.