Lengthy Travels: Part One

United Airline's Coach Class Breakfast

I'm officially back-online with no more excuses to keep me from blogging. Sorry for the long delay. What a whirlwind few weeks we’ve had since landing on American soil. I find it ironic that (it feels as though) I’ve seen more of the USA in the last three weeks upon our return to the homeland than I have in my whole life.

We arrived in San Francisco on July 22 at 9:30am, (which I only mention because we left Hong Kong at 11:30 am on that same day, two hours before we landed—gotta love that sneaky time difference), bleary-eyed and full of anticipation and excitement. We’d spent that last 12 hours on the plane with our 4 eyeballs glued to a shared copy of the seventh installment of Harry Potter, devouring it page by page. Every 4-5 aisles of the plane there was someone reading the book. One of the flight attendants begged us not to reveal anything about it, as he had yet to make it to a bookstore to pick up his own copy. Every time we stopped reading to take a bathroom break or eat a meal, we considered letting slip ridiculously false tidbits as we made our way down the aisle past eager readers. “Can you believe Hermione’s pregnant with Grawp’s baby?!” or “What was JK thinking letting them BBQ a house elf at the Quidditch Championship after party?!”, etc. were just a few of the options we considered. We'd pondered waiting to read the book until we started our cross-country drive from Kansas to San Diego, but the thought of putting ourselves on a complete media black-out until we’d had a chance to read the book seemed too daunting a prospect. Overall the plane ride was completely uneventful. It's such a short (relatively) trip when you land in California instead of Chicago or Detroit.

Quincy and his adoring fans at the HK Airport

After retrieving our beloved Quincy cat from the bowels of the airplane, and getting him through customs (which was so astonishingly low-key I think an elephant could pirouette past the customs officials and they’d barely bat an eye), we re-checked Quincy for the next flight and sat down at our gate to take in the American-ness of everything around us.

To be continued...