Days 1 & 2 - Going to China!

Off to China we go again!  We are so excited and blessed to adopt Ella.  We have been praying for this day and it is finally here!

Our travels started out a little bit more stressful than normal.  Sure, there is always the stress that goes along with packing 7 people for a 18 day trip, needing clothes for 2 different seasons, and trying to stuff up to and not more than 44 lbs. in each of 6 large suitcases.  That's expected.  The wrinkle this year came from the fact that we were on a very short timeline to travel and Thanksgiving holiday made it impossible to coordinate travel details between the U.S. and China.  This meant that we were wiring money to China on Tuesday afternoon, finishing our hotel reservations at 11PM Tuesday night, coordinating our guide services and airport transfers at midnight on Wednesday morning, and booking our in-country air travel from the Atlanta airport just before boarding our plane to China.

We started our journey at 3:30AM on Wednesday.  After loading the kids in the van we drove to the Bloomington airport.  We got all checked in and boarded our first plane around 5:30AM.  We then flew to the Atlanta airport where we had a 5 hour layover until our plane to China.  We used that time to eat and relax.

Our trip to China was not too eventful.  The seating configuration was 3-3-3.  We had two full rows on the left side of the plane plus one seat across the aisle. Jeff Lemonds at Adoption Airfare did a great job securing our seats for us!  Thankfully, the flight was not full and there was a little room to move around. The kids watched a lot of movies and mom and dad slept as much as we could.  We ended up sleeping Maelee flat across the seats.  Hannah found her normal sleeping spot on the floor.  Nathan and Claire slept in their seats.  And Micah .... well, let's just say Micah doesn't sleep well on planes.

After landing in Shanghai at 6:30PM, we met our contact at the airport and loaded our luggage into our transport vehicle.  We traveled the 20 minutes to our hotel in a mid-top Ford Transit 15 passenger van (felt like home), checked into our Marriott hotel, and immediately went to the kids indoor playground.  The kids ran around like crazies until we got kicked out at 10:45PM.

Tomorrow we go to Disneyland!