China 9. Guangzhou and Home

While in Guangzhou, we didn't get off Shamian Island, except for the night river cruise, but I thought I'd post a few Guangzhou pictures, shot from our hotel room and the balcony at the end of the hall.

And from the river front.

We flew out of Guangzhou late Wed. night for a short flight to Hong Kong, but it wasn't easy.  We left the hotel (in a van with a couple of other adoption families) to get to the airport with a lot of time to spare, but we spent a lot of time on crowded streets before finally getting on the airport freeway.  Then, when we got to the security and customs checkpoint, it was blocked while the security folks dealt with an incident.  That took more than an hour to clear so we ended up running to get to our plane right at departure time.  (We don't know what happened.  It involved soldiers.  An Aussie in the crowd said, The Chinese never explain anything.)

We spent the night in a very nice airport hotel (alas, no breakfast brunch included) then caught our flight to San Francisco late Thursday morning.  The 12-hour flight seemed to go pretty well, particularly compared to our return flight four years ago.  (Susie and I got lucky again, thanks to our travel agent: our two reserved seats had an empty seat between them and nobody showed up to claim it.  It turned out to be the only empty seat in our part of the plane.)  Four years ago Valerie spent much of the flight walking Malia.  This time, Macy slept quite a bit and Malia, of course, is all grown up now when it comes to flying.

We had bought tickets to accompany the kids to Denver, where we would spend Th. night with Mandi and Paul, then fly home Friday.  But, we had checked SW connections from SFO to ABQ, so that was our back-up plan -- avoid the hassle of an overnight offload/onload in Denver.  Getting home was a priority for all of us.

Jeff and Valerie had things under control (we think they concurred), so we went to the SW counter in SFO and found that there were seats available on a flight to ABQ via San Diego.  We caught that but due to a bit of a mix-up at the SW counter our bags traveled on later flights via Los Angeles.  Matt and Suzy picked us up (they had borrowed and taken good care of our PT while we were gone), so we had dinner at Applebee's with them, then picked up our luggage (slight panic when it didn't seem to be there with all the other luggage from LA) and drove home.

A great and very special trip.  Glad to be in Cedar Crest again.


China Cheers,

Susie and Rob

House and double rainbow, June, 2008.