An Online Journal of Our Adoption Journey

Travel Dates

We received our travel dates on February 18th.  They are for the later part of March.  We have to be in Beijing by March 21 for our orientation the next morning.  The day after that we will travel down to Wuhan and get Autumn either that day or the next.  We will stay there a few days, doing official stuff for Autumn before traveling down to Guangzhou to await our US Consulate appointment, which is scheduled for April 1.  That's just three weeks before our INS I-171H expires!  That is definitely cutting it close.  *whew*

We also got our passports back with our China Visas!  Yeah!

Tourists

Since we will be flying into Beijing, we have decided to arrive a few days early so we can see the sites before all the adoption stuff.  That way, we'll be able to visit the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, the Summer Palace, and more.  It'll be nice to see all of that, although I think we'll be very anxious to see Autumn.  We're already anxious and it's still four weeks away!  

Airlines

Azumano Travel found us some good flights for there and back, better than anything I was finding on the Internet.  We do, however, have to bounce around a bit on our flights.  We'll be flying SAN -> LAX -> SEL -> PEK (that's San Diego, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Beijing) on the way there and CAN -> SEL -> SFO -> SAN (Guangzhou, Seoul, San Francisco, San Diego) on the way back.  

We purchased a child ticket for Autumn.  We'd rather have the space than do the lap thing for 16 hours of flying.  The ticket cost almost as much as our roundtrip tickets, but I think we'll be happy to have the extra room and luggage allowance.  

Little Things

I've picked up a small journal book to write all the various details down in.  We also got a deck of English-Pinyin-Chinese vocabulary cards.  I'm still working on "nahn tse-swo" (Men's toilet).  

Our wonderful friends are throwing us a baby shower on March 1.  On the 8th we'll be driving to Flagstaff to drop Marlowe off so he'll have a good home while we're gone.  Then the following weekend will be the last minute panic, and we fly that Sunday night!  Wow!