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Welcome to our FCC-SD Travel Story Website!
| We are honored to share one of my favorite travel stories this month -- the story of Julia Jade and her loving family! |
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| On March 9th, 1999, in a chilly Yueyang government office, Julia Jade, her mother Peggy and her dad Lou became a family. Here's their wonderful story: | |
Tuesday 3-2-99 ** 6:20 p.m. San Diego Time (PST)
Lou and I, bags all packed, left on a Cloud 9 shuttle bus for Lindbergh Field to begin the first leg of our trip to the People's Republic of China. Such excitement!
** 8:25 p.m. PST
We boarded our U.S. Air 18-passenger prop plane for the half-hour flight to Los Angeles. I was glad I'd taken some Dramanine. ;-) Mental note to self: NEVER take another prop plane express. NEVER go to LAX again. What a crowded, uncomfortable, hideous place. We had to walk so far we nearly missed our plane, and the shuttle bus nearly dumped us as it took off with our feet barely in the door. I don't take kindly to such things. ;-)
** 11:40 p.m. PST
At last, the start of a 15-1/2 hour flight to Hong Kong. A Cathay Pacific Boeing 747, Flight 881. We had 3 seats for the two of us in economy, in row 37. Let's just say the airline tried to make us as comfortable as possible. Let's also say I'd like to get a hold of the engineers who designed that plane so that a person like myself, who is 5 foot 6 in her tennis shoes, has no leg room whatsoever.
I'd also like to say that the time whizzed by, and that we didn't look longingly at the business class section, and that we slept well and ate wonderful food and saw some great films and read a wonderful novel. Yes, I'd like to remember things that way. ;-) |
Thursday 3-4-99 ** 7:00 a.m. Hong Kong Time
At long last we landed at the Hong Kong airport. [How DID Charles Lindbergh DO it, sitting in that Spirit of St. Louis for 30 hours without sleep - at least we could stretch our legs and use the bathroom.]
In order to figure out the time, we figured there was a 16 hour time difference to the Pacific coast, so we added 8 hours and subtracted a day to come up with the time back home. We lost a whole day - what happened to March 3rd? That was the day Barbara Walters was supposed to interview Monica Lewinsky, and we missed it. Too bad. ;-)
The Hong Kong airport was wonderful! Clean and new and uncrowded and very user friendly. We breezed through customs and got our bags and stopped at a booth offering assistance with shutle buses to hotels. We waited only 10 minutes or so to board a wonderfully comfortable new bus that took us and our bags to the YMCA-Salisbury in Kowloon.
It took awhile to get used to everyone driving on the left side of the road, and the pollution was terrible. Everything was hazy and it was hard to see off in the distance. Not to mention the fact that it was hard to breathe. But the trip to the hotel was quite lovely, and affordable. We paid about US$36 for the two of us for the half hour ride. A cab would have been more, and not as pleasurable.
We checked into room #1283 of the Y [it was SO hard to get that silly YMCA song by the Village People out of our heads the whole time!] It was a fairly small room, but quite nice with a decent view. It had two hard twin beds, a refrigerator, a phone, a hairdryer, hot pot and thermos for water, a safe, a desk, and a TV with 17 channels in English, Australian, Cantonese and Mandarin. It didn't seem quite like a five-star hotel, as promised, but we were happy. It cost $140 a night, but we got it about half that price with a deal with our adoption agency.
Dog tired, we ate lunch at the YMCA Mall Cafe and then napped until about 5 p.m. We had hoped to meet others in our travel group and to head off for the Hard Rock Cafe just up the street, but who had the energy? We did barely make it to the 4th floor dining room for a lovely, moderately priced steak dinner.
Then we watched a bit of TV and slept from 10:30 until about 5:00 a.m. when the jet lag hit us hard.
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 Continued |
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