Sunday, Monday Feb 10-11, 2008

Our trip to China is over. We checked out of our hotel around 11:00 and then had to wait around for a couple of hours until it was time to head to the airport. We had our last lunch in China while waiting. Can you guess where? Well, McDonalds of course. Had to find something for M to eat because I knew she wouldn't eat any of the airplane food. Our guide and driver showed up around 1:00 pm to drive us to the airport. Our plane departed at 5:00 pm for Newark. Our flight left right on time. M and I both ended up sleeping quite a bit on this flight mainly because we were flying during the night. Before we knew it we were over Canada and getting closer to Newark. Everything on this trip went so well so far. We weren't going to be as lucky on our way home. Our first indication that we might have problems was when the pilot came on the loud speaker and said that we will have to be in a holding pattern for a while due to high winds in the Newark area. We probably had to circle for about 30 to 45 minutes until we were allowed to land. The whole time we circled it was pretty bumpy. We did finally land and had no problems going through immigration. We did have to wait about 1 hour to get bags before we went through customs. I was getting a little worried because we only had about 1 hour before our next flight left for home. Finally our bags came down the belt and we headed through customs quickly and just as I was going to leave our bags to get rechecked, the guy told me our flight was cancelled. Bummer!!! We had to go to the ticket counter and make other arrangements. The soonest flight would not be until the next day at 11:50am. Thank goodness the airline took care of us and provided us a hotel room and food vouchers at no charge. We were able to get a good nights rest before we headed out the next morning. Our flight the following day was delayed also. We finally took off after 1:00 pm. I was never so glad to finally land at our hometown Airport. I do have to say that M was a real trooper and she did great for me even with the delay.

M finally has been able to go back to school today, Thursday Feb 14. The evening we came home we were hit with a pretty bad snowstorm/ice storm. Schools were closed for 2 days! At least M had time to get over jetlag and we didn't have to deal with her being tired at school.