Safely in Shanghai

In the last post, when I said that we’ll check in after the flight, I really should have said “I’ll check in at 10PM Shanghai time, in our hotel, after we wrestled the luggage and wrangled the kids through Chinese Immigration and through the hundreds of drivers holding their little name signs until we “where’s Waldo’d” the one with Lisa’s name.

Anyway, we’re safely in Shanghai again, not very far from where we were last year during Ryan’s trip.  Lisa did her usual great job of making arrangements and the transportation and check in at the hotel were both smooth.  We’re all exhausted, everyone’s passed out but Dad, but that won’t last too long. If you happen to hear a thud, it’ll be my forehead hitting the desk – hopefully it won’t wake anyone up…

Just a couple of housekeeping notes.  Please feel free to add Comments and subscribe to follow along – we love reading these.  Thanks for all of the kind wishes.  To keep out the riff-raff, we’ve set things up to hold Comments for “Approval”.  You’d be surprised what crazy stuff makes its way to the Comment Feed.  We will approve all real Comments as soon as we can – from phone or iPad.  (That being said, we would be happy to forward along the contact information for the Nigerian Embassy if you’d care to assist in their attempts to repatriate some of their scratch – from what I understand the commissions for helping are quite healthy.)

Secondly, we’re still working out the kinks in our iPad/iPhone-based efforts to share photos among devices, so for now, I’ll post story and then related pictures separately.

Back to the show…

After boarding, we found our way back to steerage and our seats in Row 57.  We were settled quickly and Ashley did a great job of keeping her act together during a take-off roll that seemed awfully long.  For a while, she had a tough time during take-offs and landings.  But not today – she was all smiles having conquered her demons.

We’ve been fortunate enough to have made FOUR similar journeys with our children.  Interestingly enough, all of those flights were fairly uneventful once in the air.  Which bring us to the afternoon… During the first meal service (yes, the first – of THREE… Did I mention it was a long flight?) we hit a stretch of pretty significant turbulence.  It came out of nowhere and it was unnerving, even for me.  Food levitated above fold-down trays, there was vertical separation between drinks and cups, and floor was littered with Dinner Rolls and chunks of melon and grapes from the fruit salad.  It was as bumpy as I have ever seen – which is saying something.  Lisa held up remarkable well, which was great since she had to assure Ashley that we were not, in fact, crashing.  The boys seemed fine, though a bit nervous for a few moments.  As it has happening, my thoughts centered on where we could put down in the event that we had a true emergency.  Given that we were in a 747-400 and we were north of the Hudson Bay, options seemed fairly limited, which made me nervous for a few moments.

Worse yet, I overheard a hurried conversation among flight attendants that went something like, “I just spoke to the flight deck, they said we have 40 minutes to stow the trays.  It’s going to a get a lot worse.”  Umm, excuse me…was that OUR flight deck you were speaking with?  I went back and forth on whether I should even tell Lisa.  I did, and she didn’t panic, which was nice. We hustled the kids through their meals, everything was cleared and stowed, but the worst never came.  Thankfully, I’m not having to relay that part of the  story.

As a bit of a nerd, I follow the in-flight tracking during the trip.  For this trek, it always seems that after being in the air for 3 or 4 hours that little plane icon should be a heck of a lot farther along that dotted line that it is!  It’s hard to keep checking the flight stats with such little recognizable progress.  The other thing about this route is that the Sun never sets.  Also, this time the route again took us very near to the Norrth Pole (as we did with Ryan’s flight).  In fact, we reached nearly 88 Degrees NORTH Latitude, which I thought was pretty neat.  On that note, I grabbed data and map screenshots of this, although the map looks a bit wacky since the flat projection of the North Pole curvature is tough to show accurately.  I als grabbed a screenshot of the exact (well, almost exact, since the data refresh isn’t real-time) time where we crossed the halfway point, within 1.5 miles.  (I embrace my nerdness.)

That’s about it for now, time to get to bed.  The clock says 11PM, but my mind & body are not buying it. Nevertheless I do need sleep if I’m going to be any help at all tomorrow.

Tomorrow we have free time until about 1PM then iit’s off to Guilin for our tours.  Then later this week, we fly to Taiyuan for Tyler!!!!  He joins Team Lockhead on Monday next week.

Keep following there are pictures to come, hopefully shortly…

Thanks. Over & Out.