part 2



It was finally time to get on the airplane and we were seated in the middle rows with Alyssa, Micheline and I in one row, and Jeff, Taylor, Ben and Caleb directly behind us. Thankfully, not every seat on the plane was full, so when it came time to sack out for some sleep, the other person in our row moved and Micheline and Alyssa were able to spread out a bit more.

Due to tail winds, the flight coming home is about 3 hours shorter than the flight going over, but it still seems dreadfully long. After eating dinner and sleeping, you wake up hoping that it will be time to get off the plane, but still have a few more hours to go. On the flight over I didn't pack enough snacks that the kids liked, and breakfast didn't roll around until about an hour before we landed in China, so the kids were starving by that point. I thankfully was wiser this time around and had my backpack stuffed with food for the kids.

Micheline got a kick out of watching some slapstick comedy British TV clips whenever they would show up on one of the TV channels, and when that wasn't on, she would try to find some Tom and Jerry cartoons. For some reason, they didn't stay on the same channels and just play repeatedly...you had to channel surf to find them, which became annoying.

After 12 long hours and more than 24 hours in the same clothes, we finally landed in Los Angeles. As we were drawing close, I turned the video camera on Taylor who was becoming rather punchy as time went on. He started making up a song to the tune of "America" from West Side Story" with words such as

"I want to be in America,
no more 'hey you' in America,
I want to sleep in America,
in my own bed in America!"

China Southern doesn't have their own gate at the terminal in LAX. Instead they have a building pretty far away from the terminal where they land and then you hop on a bus that takes you to the main terminal for international flights. After getting on a bus and being packed in like sardines, they whisked us off to the main terminal while we were trying to stay balanced holding onto straps above our heads without falling over. We managed to get the little ones holding on to one of the poles so they too could stay standing without falling over as we lurched across the tarmac. When we arrived at the main terminal and disembarked I was quite thrilled to see this sign as we headed down an escalator toward immigration.