There's No Place Like Home!

I'm honestly not sure how we made it home. To anyone that's gone through the process before, I'd bow down to you, if my back and legs weren't so sore.

I'm going to give you the very very short version:

5:30 a.m. we wake up, shower, head to breakfast. We are in the lobby by 8, arguing about finding a week-old receipt to get back our Y500 deposit. We are off to the airport with our guide, and we rush around trying to find ticket area "C". Molly doesn't know her Romantic Alphabet, and tries, "T", "D", and finally "C".

Security is fast & easy in China, but for some reason it takes 30 minutes to get your ticket. And that's with a pre-paid ticket stub! The lines are not that long either. What are they doing up there? Writing ticketing software?

We go through security, and wait for over an hour. As long as I walk Mason up and down the stores, he's fine. He's starting to show interest in dolls, "Wawwa!" He wants to touch one, but his arm is coats in a chocolate moon pie that he's not really eating. As soon as it's time to board our plane to Beijing, Mason has a crying fit. EVERYONE lining up for Beijing (150 people) were looking at us like, "I hope you're not on our plane".

We get to Beijing, and we're completely lost. No guide. We have 2 hours to make our flight. Plenty of time, right? We get our baggage and start asking random people where to go. Long story short, we are in Terminal 1. We have to run to Terminal 2. It's a 10 minute walk we did in 4. This inflames our sickness. Once we're in Terminal 2 we ask 10 different people where to go, and they all tell us different answers. I thought Beijing was the land of broken English, but today we are out of luck. No one understands us. We go upstairs, downstairs, elevators, outside. We end up on a bus that drives 10 minutes to Terminal 3.

Where are we?

International flights are in Terminal 3. It's huge. We see United signs, so we can finally ask questions in English. We get in line to our ticket area and we are enticed to upgrade to Business Class. For only the 1-seat upgrade of $600, they upgraded all 4 seats. We jump at the chance. 30 minutes later they're still futzing around with who knows what. "Are we going to make the plane?" we ask. "Oh sure, oh sure". Prove it.

They point us to Tram "E".

Tram E is at the end of Hallway E, and Escalator E. Once in Tram E we squeeze in and hope the train takes us to the right place. 5 minutes later we jump out, start waking across some bridge, down some stairs, and eventually come to security again. The line is long. After that we start wandering this huge building the curves to the left, forever. Heather has to go to the bathroom the last 2 hours, but manages to keep holding it... We finally board our plane. We have 3 minutes to spare.

2 hours to make a connecting flight! Ridiculous. We ran the whole time, and we didn't even end up in the same zipcode when we finally got on our plane.

We're in Business Class, but our seats aren't together. Surprisingly, the guy sitting next to Mason is willing to go up front into Heather's seat, and Heather sits in his. Everyone around us wishes they could leave too. People walking back to Economy are overheard whispering, "I'm glad I didn't pay big bucks to sit up here for 13 hours." Mason cries for a total of 5 hours. He only wants to be held by me. He constantly wants to go to the bathroom, but is freaked out by the airplane toilet. So am I, actually.

There was a point at the 2 hour mark when a flight attendant comes back with a bunch of plastic cups for him to play with. He finally settles down for about 20 minutes and plays with them. I just sit there, crying, feeling completely exhausted, sick, and a complete failure. Cups are so simple, but I can't even provide him with toys like that. I have no idea how I'll make it through the next 11 hours. Everyone in our area is either watching a movie, or doing something with headphones to block him out.

Mason spilled all my food on my white shirt, so I look like I just won a chicken wing contest. He finally falls asleep 5 hours later at 9:07 pm. Heather is already asleep, so I stay up all night watching over him.

We let him sleep til we land at 4:30 in the morning. The flight attendant said I had to move his footrest back or the plane can't land. (Really?) I ask her if it really really needs to be right now, and she says yes. She pulls his blanket off him, unbuckles his seatbelt, and grabs for his sleeping body. I grab her hands, push her aside and tell her not to touch my kid. She walks away grumbling, "Fine What ever". He cries in my arms, but falls back asleep. Believe it or not we land 5 minutes later (not 30 like normal)

We walk off the plane, walk walk walk, and see the Immigration line. Since Mason is still Chinese, we go into the Foreign Visitors line of 300. We are there for over half an hour. Mike flew through his line and secures our luggage. We are finally through, given a pink folder, which helps us get in a short customs line. We hand over the extremely precious "brown envelope" containing his Guangzhou U.S. Consulate immigration information, that is NOT TO EVER BE OPENED until Customs. She rips it open and throws it in a pile and says, "Next". Very anti-climatic. We fly through customs, with our x-rays showing up nothing of interest. The guy behind us had beef or chicken in his luggage. Thankfully we leave that mess behind.

We get our luggage to a United Express transfer point, and pile it in a room full of luggage. Definitely an oxymoron as we find out later. We then do the exact same hustle we did in Beijing: Ride a tram to another Terminal. At least this time we can ask directions in English, read the signs, and understand the people yelling at us for being in their way.

Security in America means shoe bombs. I even take Mason's shoes off. For some reason we get a guy that spend 3 minutes per passport staring at us. He relishes in the fact that Mason is crying and I'm holding 2 pieces of dripping fruit that I want to throw away in a garbage can 5 feet behind him.

We walk 20 gates over and finally sit down before boarding the tiniest plane we've been on in a long time. A puddle jumper to Madison. Everyone is early and ready to go, but we're held up 30 minutes for luggage.

When we land in Madison, our luggage isn't there. They promised it would be delivered to our house by 11 pm. They never delivered it, and Mike had to drive to the airport in the morning to get it. It was just sitting there.

Time to catch up on some sleep after 30 hours of no sleep!
Weird, it's still Wednesday!

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