Friday, November 16, 2007
Well, I am a little late posting but I will try and start from the beginning when we left Denver. We left Denver Friday around 11:40. We had a good flight to LAX and landed on time, around 1:30pm. Now the long wait. We had to walk about 1/4 mile to the Tom Bradley airport for our international flight. We arrived there about 10 - 15 minutes later and went upstairs to sit and wait for our flight to China. We could not check in with China Southern until 7:30pm so we had a long wait ahead of us. We ate at McDonald's. They have no dollar menu at the McDonald's in the airport. Their value meals start at $8.00. When you are hungry and you know it might be your last hamburger for awhile, you will pay anything. So for $10, I had a quarter pounder meal.
After we ate, we met up with 2 other couples from our agency. They both had gotten there way before we had so they were even waiting longer than us. We sat and talked until 5:30pm when we decided to go downstairs and wait in the China Southern line so we would be the first ones in line for a good seat. It was a 15hour flight so we wanted as good of seats as we could get. Again we waited for 2 hours in line. We had to get use to the waiting since we knew we may be doing that a lot!
Finally, at 7:30pm, they opened up the ticket counter and we got our seats. We wanted the exit seats but because Brian wasn't 21, they wouldn't let all three of us sit there. So, Mark sat there and Brian and I sat behind him. We went through security which took about 30 minutes and then proceeded to our gate where we sat and waited again. We looked for something to eat but there was very little and a small sub sandwich cost $9.00. I said forget it and ate some junk food.
Finally, around 10:30 and many hours of waiting, we got to board the plane. We were finally off to China to get our China doll! The plane took off pretty much on time. After we got into the air, they served us a meal. It was some kind of chicken. Not that great but hey, it was airplane food and when you are hungry, you will eat just about anything. After our meal, they pretty much turned down the lights and we all tried to sleep for the long ride ahead of us...