Thursday, October 24, 2002

Finally, it was time to leave for home! We couldn't wait to get our daughters home and start our "real" lives.
Our travels did not start out smoothly. First of all, the bus that was supposed to take us from the hotel to the airport was late. Next, getting through GuangZhou Airport was a zoo. We had to show our passports a million times, go through a ton of security checkpoints, and push our way up to the check-in counters. (The Chinese have a different idea about waiting in lines!) We had to wait a long time in line at Immigration. Then of course we had to take a tram out to the airplane and board from the tarmac. The flight was very crowded.
In Hong Kong, we thought we had a long layover and plenty of time to get dinner. However, it took more than an hour to get ticketed for our flight. It's a good thing we had all that time, since we pretty much got ticketed and then walked on to our next flight. I was getting nervous that we were actually going to miss our flight!
The flight from Hong Kong to San Francisco seemed to last forever. The flight wasn't too crowded, so Kevin and I had an entire row to ourselves. We laid Malia down in the seats between us and she went to sleep pretty quickly. However, she is such a restless sleeper that I felt I had to watch over her all night to keep her from rolling off the seats. It was an active job! I couldn't sleep a wink---and time dragged on and on.
Finally we landed in San Francisco at 6:30 p.m. I wanted to kiss the ground! The Immigration Official was SO friendly and it felt good to be able to speak English to officials again.
We caught a shuttle bus to our hotel. Malia was wide awake, so we gave her some Benedryl to get her to sleep so that we could actually catch some sleep. It was GREAT to be able to BRUSH OUR TEETH using tap water again!