We are in Hong Kong!

Or as it should be titled The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of travel to China.

It started out bad, we had to get up at 3:30am to get ready for our 6:00am flight out of Jacksonville. I was up at 2 worrying about not getting up at 3:30. The good is we were through security in less than 10 minutes with no full body searches. We only had one small hiccup in security when they decided to test my backpack for bomb making residue (they did not find any),they said it had something to do with the excessive amount of electronics that were in my backpack. So what is the definition of excessive?

We took off and went to Chicago. We then had a 5 hour wait in Chicago for the flight to Hong Kong.

The flight to Hong Kong was good and bad. The good was it went very smoothly after a 45 minute wait on the tarmac. We actualy made up 30 minutes of the time and only landed 15 minutes late. The staff were very atentative to us we got two hot meals which were good on the airplane scale of foodness. They came by every hour or so with some water although is was only about 2 ounces, just enough to get your mouth wet. The ugly was after 5 hours on the plane we both felt like we had lived our entire lives on that plane and we still had over 10 hours to go before we landed.

Hong Kong:
Our arrival at Hong Kong was uneventful, immigration took less than 10 minutes because as the line got long the staff opened up more windows and moved us through (Disney should pay attention to this). We came out of the customs area looking for our guide, we found Cecelia almost immediately and she had us stand and wait for the other family from CCAI that was on our flight. We left the airport by bus for the hotel which was about 30 minutes away. While we were driving to the hotel she told us about Hong Kong. She told us that if we wanted to go out and walk about the city that we could and that it was a very safe city. She said this at least 3 different times on the way to the hotel. The third time she mentioned this she did add the caviat to watch out for pickpockets (safe?). Cecilia checked us into the hotel without incident. The one small glitch was when we tried to leave the room to get dinner we were not able to use the safe as it would not lock. I contacted the front desk who sent a young lady to show me (the person with excessive electronics) how to use the safe. She then sent for engineering to fix it, engineering then sent for a new safe to put in our room. We had a late dinner.

The room is good, although the mattress feels like we are sleeping on a box spring instead of a mattress. My back actually feels good this morning. I may have to get one of these for the house.

We are going on a half day tour of Hong Kong today and tomorrow we fly to Nanchang and get our girls.

I will try and post some pictures later today.

Larry