Day 4...(kind of)...

I wish I could start this post and say that it was actually Day 4. It really needs to start with the continuation of Day 3.

So, at the end of our story we were waiting to find out if our flights had been cancelled. Yes, they were and what fun that brought. If any of you have seen cattle herded this is exactly what it looked like when the flights were all cancelled. About 1 million (okay, maybe only 10,000) people started their treks back to the ticket counters where you were supposed to go and get rebooked. This was fun....Not. I’ll leave out a lot of the details but lets just say we saw a lot of different things happen when you have that many angry people in one “HOT” room the size of 3 football stadiums.

I did get in one of the lines and let the others go and find some Burger King for dinner, which we didn’t know at the time would be breakfast too. I think I was in this line from 7:30 pm until 10:30 pm. I had no idea I had been waiting that long only to be told that we could be rebooked on a flight two days later. I tried everything like “but what about the kids I’m traveling with” and “I don’t know this town”, trying to put on some fake tears but they were coming. Ok, maybe the last part was an exaggeration. The good news in all of this was that we met Matthew, a young man from Mississippi, who at the end of this story becomes the Hero.

Oh, I forgot to mention that our friend Jane said that I was now a Hero for going on the Great Wall so many times but of course this is the same girl that looked at my family photos and said “Wow, you look much older and wider there”. Yes, I said “wider”. hahahaha....

Back to our adventure, which we are now calling “The Amazing Race: China Edition”. Matthew was able to find David in a sea of all of these people and took a guess and said “Bring Me Hope” to which David replied “Yes”. Matthew had already been here a couple weeks at another camp and was switching locations to our camp. He had a chinese cell phone “PTL!!!!”. He had also found a man int he airport that would take us to a hotel. You’ll notice that I didn’t highlight hotel - yeah, it ended up being a 1/2 star hotel. The 1/2 star was because it had a/c, that was about it. So we all did get a few hours sleep and met just before 8 am to take a shuttle back to the airport and see what our options were.

I want to take a pause here to let you know that even at this point in the story it may sound like I am being negative on this trip and that we were all ready to throw in the towel when in all actually that was not the case. Spirits were still good and all we wanted to do was get to camp and meet our buddies. Some of the story may sound bad but we did have a lot of laughs along the way.

So, you want to hear how it continues... stayed tuned next week, same time, same bat channel... hahaha, just kidding. I think I will split the post for size and leave room photos which I will try and add today or tonight.

From the same Beijing International Airport, Terminal 3, Beijing, China, China Team out.