48-Hour Day, 4-Hour Night

Sadly, this is our last blog post of our trip.

We were woken by an alarm set for 4:30 and a hotel call we had set up last night. We were off to the airport on an empty road in China. Very strange! Very strange! Before we knew it, we were on the plane to Shanghai with two carry on’s this time.  The school had presented us with beautiful plaques to take home not realizing how much more work it would be to have to take two carry on’s.

The plane took off 30 minutes later than scheduled, which did not work in our favor considering originally we would only have 2.5 hours to change terminals, but because of the late take off, we now only had a 2 hour layover. Montana and LuRue did some airplane sleep during the flight. We were served a "delicious" breakfast of extremely bland rice and some sort of bread with spicy meat inside.

Once the plane landed, we had to get our bags, go to Terminal 2, check in at Delta on the level above & get our passes to Seattle, drop our bags off, go through customs, hurry up through security. The people that helped us weren’t very helpful, because they kept saying how we should’ve been earlier as if it was our fault. The person who gave us the boarding ticket even put a note on it telling us to be at the gate 55 minutes early. We had to butt in line several times, but we did make it 20 minutes before the flight was scheduled to take off.  Actually, what happened, was the gate closed about 5 minutes after we got there (LuRue was drenched in sweat), but we sat in the airport for another hour before actually taking off. Good thing we didn’t have another close take off to catch.

On the 10-hour flight, we did a lot of movie watching. Montana and LuRue both watched the modern version of “Annie”. LuRue then watched two other videos she didn’t think Montana would be interested in, as Montana did some video editing and watched “The Theory of Everything” which proved she was never going to be a scientist or mathematician. They ended the plane flight by watching “Singing in the Rain” together – a movie suggested by LuRue in the beginning of the trip. The movie ended just a bit after they landed. When they had left Shanghai, it was Saturday mid-day and when they arrived it was Saturday morning. Where did the time go?

Once we had successfully dropped our luggage off to go to Tuscon a helper kindly pointed the way to D3, which involved getting on two subways. However, we got there and the huge sign with all the gates and flights said N16 was our gate. We asked a worker just to make sure, but it was N16. As LuRue turned around to start walking back to the N gates, she tripped over a man's luggage and fell onto the carpet. Luckily, no harm done, but after surviving 3 countries coming very close to falling it would seem like she would have it down to an art…obviously not.

We backtracked to the N gates where we had started our little adventure. Once we knew we were in the right area, we immediately looked for a plug in to charge computers and go on Google. Wow! We’ve been away from Google for too long. We spent a few hours organizing and replying to unanswered emails. At 11, Montana, LuRue and Montana’s parents did a video chat before we headed to board the plane. We are finally back in America!

PS...video summaries of India and China will be posted some time tomorrow.