August 14--Leave for China!

I can't believe this day has finally arrived. After waiting more than 4 years, we are finally off to meet our daughter and bring her home to our family. We are nervous, excited, and mainly just ready to get this over with! Michael's Dad dropped us off at the airport after Michael crunched his Dad's bumper pulling out of the garage. What an auspicious way to begin our trip...

We encountered no problems on the first leg of our trip and even arrived in Detroit about 30 minutes early. While eating lunch, I checked my messages and discovered that our updated I-171H arrived in Guangzhou overnight, another bonus. Now we will not be stuck in China without a visa for Sophia. Unfortunately, when I called CCAI to thank them for this information about 5 minutes before boarding our flight to Tokyo, Bernice informed me that they had just discovered that our connection to Guangzhou had been canceled. We and several other families (none from the Hubei group) would arrive too late in Tokyo to make another flight. Fortunately, the Detroit gate agent said that she would communicate with Northwest in Tokyo to sort things out for us. But in the course of rebooking us (only Michael and me--she was planning to reroute the other families once our flight departed because it was last call for our flight), she canceled my reservation altogether and another agent gave away my seat to a standby passenger before she could correct the problem. Believe it or not, after a moment of panic, she let us know that she had rebooked us into business class. Wow--knowing that to book this ourselves would have cost several thousand dollars extra, we were extremely grateful and lucky. Let me tell you, business class nearly made the flight enjoyable (in fact, let me just say it actually did!). We were seated in the upper deck of the 747, just where I have always wanted to sit! I was surprised at the number of American kids in business class--they seemed to be a few families whose daddies must work in Japan--they were all headed back to start school. Anyway, we felt very pampered on the 13-hour flight. And, when we landed in Tokyo, indeed the Northwest folks had taken care of everything--even booking us all into a really nice hotel by the airport, free dinner, and free breakfast, plus transfers to and from the airport. So, now we can say we have spent time in Japan, even if we never really left the city of Narita, where the airport is located. The next morning, we arrived in Guangzhou on a Japan Airlines flight, were met by CCAI staff, and transported to the White Swan. I was pleasantly surprised to find that our room was very nice after reading several negative reviews on Trip Advisor. Either we were on a renovated floor or there are some very picky people writing the reviews. Tonight we will have a group dinner at a local Thai restaurant and tomorrow morning, it is back to the airport for the flight to Wuhan.