Getting There is Half the Battle, Part 3

Thursday, June 28th

I woke up at six with my back feeling like I had been run over. Lili woke up a few minutes later and I gave her a morning bottle since there was no place to nurse with discretion. (Well, I could have gone behind the phones, but someone had vomited there and no one bothered to clean it up.) We all played with the baby for awhile and then at 7:30 Mom and I got in line to check in. The minutes ticked by and a little after eight we got to the desk. Thank heavens everything went smoothly. We checked in our luggage, got our boarding passes and were on our way to security.

We were about to go through when I noticed a weird code on the bottom of the boarding pass—SSS. I now know that it means that you are marked for a random search. I discovered this a few minutes later when we went through the checkpoint. After Liliana and I stepped through the metal detector, the security guard told me that I was selected for a search. Then before I could even blink, she grabbed Lili out of my arms and took off with her. Now, I always try to be cooperative with airport security, but this really upset me. Lili started crying and the woman glared at her and told her to be quiet. She’s a baby, for crying out loud.

To make matters worse, I had to boarding passes, but they wouldn’t let Mom get them from me, so she couldn’t go through the detector and take Lili. They took forever searching, with Lili getting more upset with each passing moment. One guard finally let my mom through, but they wouldn’t let her near us. They then started pawing through Lili’s diaper bag. It was a total mess.

After about ten minutes of riffling through the bag, the lady shoved it, all its contents, and Lili at me and told me to move along. Mom put the bag back together while I tried to calm Lili down. Feeling a little shaken, we made our way through the airport, getting a wheelchair for Grandpa along the way, and finally settling in to the food court for some breakfast. Mom and I left Grandpa with Lili (who was sucking down juice in between little gasping sobs) to get some food. I found a Danish and Cinnamin Roll for Mom and me to share while she got Grandpa some eggs and other breakfast stuff.

After breakfast, we went to our gate to discover that our flight was...
DELAYED.

I actually started laughing—of course it would be delayed, why wouldn’t it be? It was scheduled to go at noon and wasn’t going to take off until three. I called Larry to let him know what was going on and he laughed too. He told me that United had told the tour company that we had gone to Los Angeles and were on our way to Beijing, Ummm...not so much United. I went ahead and called the company to tell them when we were due in and our flight number. The lady told me no problem (he he he).

We made Lili a little play area on the floor and let her crawl and stretch her little legs. The waiting didn’t actually seem that long and at three we finally boarded our flight to Beijing. We ended up idling on the runway for another hour, so we finally took off at about five.

Mom and I made a little palette out of pillows for Lili to lay on across our laps. She was so sweet when she fell asleep. I wish I could have said the same about Grandpa. I kept trying to nod off while Lili was asleep, but he kept waking me up to ask me questions. We were fed Chinese food for dinner and then later a Chinese snack. Grandpa ate all of his and most of Mom’s and mine—he just kept eating. About four hours into the flight, Mom switched seats with me and Lili and I snuggled up together and went to sleep. Even now it is such a sweet memory, cuddled with my daughter and her stuffed dog. We woke up in time for breakfast (American style) and before we knew it, we were in China! We landed in Beijing after a twelve hour flight at about 6 pm Beijing time (which is thirteen hours ahead of the USA). I was so excited for our trip to really begin!