We're here!

Well, as others have reported, I am unable to log into our blog account to post, so I’m trying to go through email. I’ve tried it before w/just a sentence or two and it seems to work. I’m not sure about the pictures though. We left Cleveland @7:30 on 4/15 (after leaving the battery charger for the camera @home and also thinking we lost Denise’s cell phone. We had a worker @one of the kiosks call her number and her purse vibrated!), arrived in Newark, NJ, no problems. Walked around for a while, had lunch, and took off for Beijing @12:20pm. Good seats for an international trip, not first class, but the first row in coach w/a little extra leg room! Continental has a snazzy audio/video setup for watching movies and whatnot. For our row they had individual LCD screens which rotated up from underneath your seat and locked in front of you to view. I got to watch WALL-E and Denise started watching a movie w/Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker. This is probably 5 hours into a 15 hour flight. Our section conks out w/no audio or video. The system just keeps rebooting. So, Denise slept (some), I read a book and watched Meet the Robinsons on my laptop. We made it into Beijing on time as well, about 14:00 on Friday 4/16.

Now Denise is a woman possessed. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, we tried to take as much of our house w/us as we could! And she was bound and determined to make sure our luggage came along w/us! So we go through China’s customs, get on board the shuttle to take us to the baggage claim. All bags accounted for, excellent! Hmm…where’s our contact for AWAA? We wait for a little while, then I suggest we use a pay phone and call the number listed for our contact here in Beijing (Sherry). My wife goes one better. She asks one of the porter type people if they would call the number since her cell is useless. Nice enough guy, calls, gets in touch w/Sherry and lets Denise talk w/her. They aren’t allowed into the passenger areas at all, she was waiting outside. So now we have this MASS of people going out the airport and there’s all kinds of signs for passengers and whatnot. We finally hook up w/Sherry and two other families that came in out of Chicago. One family is from Pittsburgh and the other from a suburb of South Bend, IN.

Yes all the craziness you hear about Chinese traffic is true! We get into a van and we’re OFF!! Honking, swerving, his doing it all! Sherry is going over what to do when we get to the hotel, exchange some money, the basic itinerary, etc. All the while “Dale Earnhardt Jr.” is speeding us through rush hour traffic. We did manage to see a few of the obligatory “man on bicycle carrying large items”. Made it to the hotel, got checked in, went to our room (no squatty potty here thank you so much), then went out on the town w/the couple from Pittsburgh to buy….water. Yep, keep that H20 acomin’. We split off from the other couple afterwards and went across the street from our hotel to….Pizza Hut! We were the token American couple, can’t speak a lick of Mandarin, poor server trying to make out what in the world we are talking about if the iced tea is brewed or just mixed.

Denise is now justifiably crashed in bed and I’m signing off. Tomorrow is sight seeing w/Tiananmen Square and some other touristy stuff! Thanks for reading and following along w/us!