Archive for January 30th, 2008
Okay – this is it. This is the last day (+1) of our trip and will finally get us home and caught up on The Trip posts. Bear with me as this will be a really long post.
Day 17 – Guangzhou/Tokyo/Chicago/Roanoke
We started out the morning bright (not really, it was dark) and early. We were all up at 3:30am so we could finish packing and get ready to meet the others at 5am. None of us got much sleep the night prior due to a combination of excitement to be heading home and dreading the upcoming trip. Not that we were anxious to get started or anything but we were the first to be in the bus loading area and were on the bus as soon as the doors opened.
Our flight was at 9:15am but the bus left the hotel at 5:30am in order to get everyone there and on to their flights in time. The airport is about an hour(ish) from the hotel and the weather was bad, so we weren’t too upset about the early departure time. Our facilitator talked for a bit when we started out – reminding everyone of the importance of maintaining contact with each other for the kids’ sake and teaching them to be proud of their Chinese heritage. She also thanked us for being such an amenable group – I guess not all groups get along as well as we did and it can be unpleasant and difficult when they don’t. Unfortunately we didn’t get to know the folks who adopted from Guangdong very well, but our Wuhan group got along swimmingly.
We were the only ones flying All Nippon for our departure so J was off like a shot as soon as the bus stopped. He was very ready to get rid of our bags, so there was no time for goodbyes beyond a wave as I trotted after him with baby in tow. Most of the others were flying Northwest with a few who opted to make their own arrangements as we did. We breezed through customs and immigration although the immigration people did examine Ava and her passport closely. Security wasn’t a lot of fun as J had to drink from the thermos of hot water we had for bottles and Ava and I got felt up by some security chick before they would let us through.
We finally broke free and headed toward a Starbucks knock off joint where we were totally fleeced of most of our remaining yuan. Now y’all know this is an amazingly cheap country to travel in…that is until you get to the airport where we paid over $20USD for a soda, a cup of coffee, a waffle, and some toast. Good thing we had some yuan we needed to get rid of. Between that and an Olympics souvenir shop I managed to spend it all except for 6 yuan which I gave to my hairdresser last week for her son.
The comments from strangers started at the airport. There was an American woman there with her daughter who kept staring at us while we were eating. I guess she finally couldn’t stand it any more and came to ask about Ava. The lady was very nice and said some wonderful things about raising kids, and then totally mortified her twenty something daughter by recounting embarrassing childhood events.
We finally made it onto the plane and were treated absolutely wonderfully by All Nippon. From check-in onward they were totally about customer service and making sure that we were taken care of. The flight attendants were so nice and they all wanted to come and coo over Ava. They really went out of their way to ensure that we were comfortable and happy. American carriers can certainly learn a thing or two about service from the Asian carriers. The difference is absolutely amazing.
Our flight to Tokyo was about 3.5 hours and since we had bulkhead seats on this one we gate checked the carseat and they gave us a bassinet for her. She slept for a little over an hour and happily played in her seat or on us for the rest of the time. She whined a bit as we were descending (likely her ears) but she was very, very good. Again, the flight attendants were awesome and definitely helped entertain Ava through the flight.
We got off in Tokyo and had just about an hour to connect to the next flight. This was a comedy of errors from the get-go. The carseat/stroller crashed (good thing the baby was on me and the diaper bag was in the stroller) and the baby needed to be changed. Nobody told us that even on connecting flights that were only one level away we would have to completely go through security again AND that they would stop everyone else to let a large group of schoolgirls go through security first AND that Ava would (of course) need to be changed at the worst possible time AND that it’s hard as heck to find the darn gate once we did finally make it through security. The one upside to all of this is that I was nearing breakdown by the time we did finally make it to the gate and the United rep took one look at us schlepping all this crap around and let us preboard with the first class people. Mind you that I’m also coughing like I have TB and gasping for breath at this point.
We transferred from All Nippon to United at this point and the quality of service degraded quickly once we were on board. I also got paid back in spades for all the times that I (unintentionally) gave the look to people with infants on planes that were seated next to me. For what it’s worth, this is my public apology to those people. Now I know that the only thing worse than a crying infant on a plane is to be the parents of that infant, because you feel infinitely worse when you’re also annoyed by, but yet responsible for, the crying baby. I can’t tell you how many dirty looks we got from the people sitting around us as Ava was fussing a bit before takeoff. A couple of them glared at us and tried to move to other seats but the flight attendants made them move back since the plane was relatively full.
We had a seat and carseat for Ava so by this time I’m just pissed about all the mean looks and becoming increasingly stressed at the same time. Ava continued to fuss as we took off but J and I managed to calm and settle her pretty quickly. She was very active so we did lots of handing her back and forth for an hour or so. She was absolutely wired and getting loud and demanding so we (bad parents, I know) finally broke out the benadryl. By this time, I’d reached my limit with being sick, exhausted, and emotionally drained and finally just broke down. I cried for ages – J couldn’t look at me or talk to me without setting me off again. I must have spent at least an hour crying in the lavatory. I was a mess and I’m not normally a crier so neither I nor J knew what to make of this development. I’m so thankful that J really stepped in and took over with Ava. He did most of the caretaking on the rest of this very, very long flight (11.5 hours). Thankfully, she did sleep for much of it and she did get her first rose from a male admirer – one of the first class flight attendants walked through and fell hard for her. He fashioned her a rose from an aluminum omelet cover (see below).
Our flight attendants (both male) on this flight were awful. They were loud and unhelpful and mostly invisible except for the one who banged Ava in the head with the beverage cart and the other one who spent the whole flight talking to the passenger behind us who claimed to be some semi-famous music producer. Of course, our flight attendant is a wanna-be singer who has met one or two famous people and did a commercial voice over for some radio station – apparently in his eyes this makes him marketable and he did his level best to impress the music producer (supposedly – but why would he be flying in Economy Plus if he were famous) throughout the entire. freaking. flight.
Eventually the hell that was the Tokyo to Chicago flight ended and I managed to pull myself together well enough to brave O’Hare Airport. By the way, is there any particular reason that they can’t offer elevators in all sections? I can’t imagine if I’d had to do this alone with a child in a stroller. J managed to maneuver kid and stroller down two escalators while I dealt with the carry on baggage until we got to immigration. It was a small blessing that we were able to go through the foreigners line since Ava was traveling on her Chinese passport and that line was much, much shorter. That went smoothly and Ava was made an American citizen in short order with no fanfare, although the immigrations officer did at least offer up a couple of congratulations. We then picked up our baggage (everything made it) and, thankfully, we did not have to go through a detailed customs search. We rechecked everything and hopped on the airport transit system to Terminal One.
Did I mention yet that I hate O’Hare? I really do.
Security here was mean. Really mean. The TSA guy was a real jerk and made J go through without me and Ava – leaving me to maneuver the baby through and telling me that the stroller had to be x-rayed. The problem is that I couldn’t break it down by myself holding Ava and the agent wouldn’t let anyone help me, not to mention that the stroller won’t fit through the machine anyway. J was pissed and bitching from one side and I’m in tears again on the other and the guy finally gets mad at me for blocking the way and calls his supervisor over. Thank goodness – the supervisor takes one look at me getting ready to cry for the millionth time that day and calls the other guy off. He hand carried everything through for me and waved us on.
More issues at the gate that I won’t belabor simply because they did manage to get us out of there mostly on time, even if we did have to walk out to the plane on icy steps in 1 degree weather (literally). J once again gets the carseat secured and takes over with Ava for the flight. I doze off before the plane taxied out, as does Ava and everyone else on the plane. It was a short flight, only about an hour, and we were in Roanoke pretty quickly.
It was so good to walk off of that plane and see my dad and brother there to pick us up. I think Ava made a couple of easy conquests that day. Only minor issues at this end – we had the only checked bags on the flight so we waited and waited at baggage claim only to find out that they were taken to the ticket counter. No big deal even though it took us asking a couple of times to find out where our bags were. My brother poured us into the Xterra and we headed for my parents house. Ava slept almost the entire hour long drive.
I’ll skip all the homecoming details and save them for another post.
The next day (the 31st) we loaded Ava, the dogs, and all of our stuff into the truck and headed home. One of the pups was a little bit sick so she got the front seat with J and Ava and I took the back seat where we both promptly crashed and slept most of this trip (5 hours), too. We were all so glad we took the carseat with us to China as she had already figured out that carseat mode = sleep. This made life so much easier for both flying and driving.
All total we spent about 18-19 hours on planes and a few more hours in airports and cars. J and I have traveled a lot in our lives but this trip was the most physically and emotionally demanding experience that I’ve ever encountered and no one could have fully prepared us for it. It’s definitely one of those experiences that you can’t really understand unless you’ve done it.
So this finally finishes up the trip posts, although I still need to add photos. I’ll try to do a homecoming post (no pictures, can you believe it? So tired that we didn’t even think of them until too late.) and then get back to the present posthaste.