First day on the way to China

[aadler]

Originally, our itinerary was supposed to be relatively simple: a morning flight to Chicago, one-hour layover, then a sixteen-hour flight to culminate in Hong Kong. Didn’t work out that way. On arriving at the terminal, we were told our first flight had been delayed due to weather at Chicago/O’Hare. That delay meant there simply wasn’t any way to catch the later connecting flight, and rescheduling proved enormously difficult. (As we later learned, most flights to China for the next few days were already fully booked.) Eventually we were given a new route that would run us through Houston and San Francisco … but, as Susan suspected and then confirmed after the fact, that schedule would have us arriving in Hong Kong a full day late, and hours after the end of a nursing conference she had arranged to attend once she knew her (initial) itinerary.

Because of this, we was trying to work out a corrective alternative from roughly the moment we arrived in Houston. Against all the odds as I understood them, she was able to come up with something … which was finalized at a time that gave us half an hour to catch our new next flight, to Los Angeles. On arrival at LAX, we were allowed to wait in Air Canada’s business lounge (somehow we’d been bumped up to Business Class for the flight out, and this was apparently some kind of arrangement with Air China). Susan spent the time making new friends, which she does everywhere; I used the time to send updated arrival info to our son, and to check that our luggage was suitably scheduled to be forwarded to Hong Kong. And, since our flight didn’t board till past midnight, we were still at LAX when the day turned over.

Next Day