We've arrived

After 14 hours of being trapped crammed in an airplane, J., P., and I are here in Shanghai. While I love traveling, I really do not enjoy long-haul flights. There is just nothing fun or enjoyable about them. I always secretly hope that when I look at the board with the names of passengers who have been upgraded to business class that my name will be there. But it sadly never is.

While the plane ride was uneventful, the trip was not without its excitement. Early in the morning, as we were trying to get everything ready to leave, J. opens the fire-proof safe to get the money and passports. I finish getting what I'm doing together and we say the grueling good-byes to the children we were leaving at home.

All was going well and traffic was light, and so we arrived at the airport with plenty of time to check-in, go through security, and get to our gate. Well, all was going well until I take out my passport to start the check-in process and realize what I'm holding has holes punched in it. Holes in a passport are never good because it means what you are holding is an expired passport which can't be used. J. quickly looks at his passport and realizes that he has an expired one as well. So we are living every traveler's nightmare of being at the airport and realizing we can't do anything because we brought the wrong passports.

J. quickly calls our friend who drove us and tells him our sad tale. He heads back to our house to pick-up the good, non-expired passports from B. who found them in the fire-proof safe. It was a very long 45 minutes while we waited for our passports to arrive. We are extremely thankful that it was early Sunday morning or else the trip to Evanston and back would have taken far longer. I won't think about how fast our friend had to drive in order to make-up for our mistake.

But the passports did arrive and we did check-in. On the plus side, the huge crowd which greeted up when we first arrived at the airport had all gone their separate ways, so we didn't need to wait to check-in. Then, even better, as we entered the loooong security line, we got shuttled to a newly opened line, so we had very little waiting there as well. We even waited 45 minutes at the gate before they started boarding. All in all, in could have been so much worse.

Here is the moral to my little story. Don't store your old expired passports in the same place where you keep your good ones. And if you do, be sure that your spouse knows about your quirky little storage system.

Tomorrow we have a full day of meeting all the people who have taken care of R., and loved her, and made it possible for us to adopt her. We won't get to actually meet her, but we will meet her foster family and friends and see the things that are important to her.