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Or, "How To Fit Two Days' Worth Of Travel Into One Reeeeally Long Day".
Once we left Atlanta to head to LAX and overseas, I realized that the daily entries on our logs may not exactly mesh with everyone's timelines back home since we cross the International Dateline during our travels, effectively putting us a full twelve hours ahead of the timeline of everyone in Atlanta. That being said, I'm entering this information based on the local date and time of the area in which we find ourselves. Hopefully this will help avoid some of the confusion regarding our journal entries.
We survived the 4 hour flight to LAX in good shape, though we were more than a bit hungry by the time we arrived. We wasted no time in finding the McDonald's in the airport and getting something to fill our stomachs. I know most people realize this, but airport food is expensive, especially considering what you get for the price you pay.
Once our stomachs were satisfied, we went to the departure area for our next flight. Since the ticketing agent in Atlanta only got us boarding passes for the flight from Hartsfield to LAX, we were forced to wait for someone to show up at the gate and work on getting seat assignments at that time. We paid for economy class seating, but I had thought about trying to get upgraded to premium economy class if possible. Shortly before the ticketing agent showed up, someone from the airlines placed a small sign on the counter stating that people could upgrade to premium economy for only (!) $350. After seeing that little sign I didn't bother even asking about the upgrade.
We finally got our seat assignments and eventually got to board the plane. It was shortly after this time that we both began to think that the additional $1,050 might be worth the extra expense. We had access to personal video monitors for the flight, but that wasn't much consolation when the people in front of both of us decided to fully recline their seats for the duration of the flight. Any hope of comfort pretty much faded away at that time.
I mentioned earlier that Abigail handled all of this traveling like a champ. I want to publicly praise her for not only being very well behaved and well mannered, but also for having no emotional meltdowns due to the length or discomfort of the travel. Throughout the journey in most of the airports she wanted to pull her own suitcase and follow along with us. She never said she was tired or complained about the walking. About the only thing that concerned us was that she was getting only a little more sleep than we were getting. It didn't seem to phase her, though. She was just excited to know that she would be seeing her sister soon.
The fifteen hour flight to Guangzhou was uneventful, even if it was somewhat uncomfortable. I will be uploading some pictures later which show some of the stats that are displayed on the personal video monitors. Our current internet connection is somewhat slow, so I may not be able to load them for some time, along with the other pictures.
Once we got into Guangzhou and unfolded ourselves from our seats we headed through the International Arrivals and Customs area and met up with Jophy, our guide. She explained our upcoming itinerary with us to give us an idea of what the next few hours would be like. We had a few hours to kill before our next flight to Guizhou, so we took the time to get some local currency and buy some breakfast. Note: hotcakes and sausage are not what we consider hotcakes and sausage in the U.S. Both are meat-based here, but we just don't know what the hotcakes were, exactly. I also got to experiment with how to handle the local currency. The main difficulty I have is differentiating between the bills and what we would consider change, because both are printed on paper. Very confusing!
The flight to Guizhou only lasted a bit over and hour. It was a small plane, but we had very little turbulence to deal with. Once we arrived we could tell that this wasn't anything close to the international airports we had been going through earlier. We deplaned on the tarmac and waited for a shuttle bus to take us to the terminal. We then just had to pick up our baggage and take a bus to the hotel.
Finally, after over thirty hours of travel time, we were where we needed to be in order to meet Hannah for the first time!
More to come about that in another post.
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