Flight to China, and arrival [29-30 September]

[aadler]

Susan and I both stayed up late getting ready; went to bed past midnight, and got up 4:00 AM (29 September) to finish our final preparations and get on the road. I cooked up some ham and eggs for our breakfast: last eggs in our refrigerator, and then put the remaining ham in the freezer, so we wouldn’t be leaving food for three weeks. On the road by 4:15.

Everything proceeded without any overriding difficulty or complication. We arrived at the airport fifteen minutes before the hour-in-advance we’d been aiming for, and got checked in expeditiously enough. (For some reason our reservation number wasn’t attached to an itinerary, so they searched the system till they found another number that would access the needed information.) When it was time to take off, that was delayed for an hour because of fog, but we were scheduled for a four-hour layover in Chicago before boarding our connecting flight, so that wasn’t a huge issue.

Upon arriving in Chicago, Susan and I found the gate from whence we would depart, and settled in to wait. After a bit she decided that the trail mix we’d brought with us wasn’t quite enough, so we had a nice meal at a Tuscan restaurant around the terminal corner from our gate. By the time we were done with that, they were actually beginning to board passengers, but our group wasn’t called for another ten minutes, so again no rush.

This flight, too, was delayed, this time because something was wrong with one of the fans, and the crew wanted to make sure everything was absolutely perfect before beginning a 15½-hour flight across the ocean. I kept sending WeChat posts to Kevin via my phone, so he’d be able to estimate our arrival time; once again, it wound up being almost precisely an hour’s delay.

The flight over the ocean … well. It wasn’t the luxury we’d experienced during our first flight to China (when we were bumped up to business class as a way of apology for other delays), but it was decently okay. There were nearly fifty seats vacant on the flight, so plenty of people were able to have extra room; Susan and I had an empty seat between us, so we weren’t crowded. The service was conscientious and thoughtful, the food was better than decent (though not as frequent as I remember from the first trip). Susan slept more than I did; I doubt I got more than an hour, hour and a  half of sleep, mostly I watched movies on the little monitor mounted on the back of the seat in front of me.

(Of course, since we were flying ahead of the sun the whole way, and passing through multiple time zones as we did so, I don’t actually know at what point September 29th gave way to September 30th.)

I had worn my loosest, least confining clothes, and before boarding in Chicago I had tucked my shoes into my backpack and changed into fuzzy-lined moccasins; even so, over nearly two-thirds of a day in the air, I was getting cramped and achy. Just how it is.

We arrived maybe 8:30 PM, spent nearly another twenty minutes taxiing around before getting to the arrival gate. I went ahead and changed back into regular walking shoes while other people were getting off; Susan, naturally, had written a personal thank-you letter to the crew, and they gave us special little travel bags in thanks of their own. With customs and baggage claim (which involved waiting for luggage from a previous flight to be claimed before the bags from our flight could begin appearing), it would have been, probably, an additional half-hour before we made it out to the regular non-restricted part of the terminal.

Kevin was waiting for us, and just like 2½ years ago, he and his mother hugged for a long time before we could move on to other proceedings. Mei-li was at the airport with him, and once we joined her, she and Kevin went to a noodle place (next to the airport McDonald’s which had been our first meal in China on my previous trip here) and bought a welcoming meal for us. We took a taxi from Hong Kong to the mainland, across one of the big bridges, and there were so many other cars ahead of us, the drive must have taken at least an hour and a half, most of which was spent sitting at one particular spot while cars ahead of us stopped to have passports checked.

Once we got through, Kevin’s father-in-law (who Americanizes his name to Logan for our benefit) was waiting to pick us up. Susan and I had assumed in advance that, due to our late arrival, it wouldn’t be till tomorrow that we got to see our granddaughter; as I put it to Susan, “It would be wrong of them to bring an infant all this way, and wait all this time, just to take her back home so late.” While we were at the noodle place it had become clear that I was right. Currently, Kevin and Mei-li are back living with her parents, so that her mother and aunt can contribute to (or entirely take over) taking care of the baby, who is in fact the first grandchild on both sides of the family; Logan drove us to the married couple’s recently-unoccupied apartment, and Kevin showed us where things were and how to operate the individual room A/C units — and entered the apartment’s wi-fi password into my phone, so we could use their internet — before going to rejoin his family back at the parents’ place.

I took a shower, simply because it had been so long since my last one and I was feeling so tired and grungy, but Susan and I went on to bed almost immediately thereafter. I still didn’t (entirely) know what time it was — hadn’t got my watch changed over yet — except that it was time to sleep. So we did.

Next day