June 25, 2015 What A Homecoming!

We woke up at the crack of dawn and boarded a van for the drive to Hong Kong to catch our flight back to the US.  The drive provided some amazing views of China.  Here's one crossing the bridge into Hong Kong.  This pic does not do it justice...it was an awesome view.

After three pukes, two leaky bags and one pissed off driver, we arrived in Hong Kong.   When we boarded the plane we were so worried about stocking up on barf bags we completely forgot to get a pic of Liya on her first plane ride.  Third child syndrome is kicking in already.  The good news is her motion sickness does not include planes or maybe having your pockets stuffed with barf bags somehow cures her!  She made it through both flights without an incident.  She enjoyed watching TV and slept quite a bit during the long flight.  Our flight out of HK was delayed about an hour and a half.  We arrived late to Chicago and the baggage took forever to come out.  Since we were adopting, we had to go through customs and an additional immigration area.  Let me just say that I appreciate the thankless job the customs and immigration officials do, but someone needs to implement some serious standard operating procedures within these organizations.  This is the first impression visitors/immigrants have of our country and it's not a pretty one.  First off, when we came to the additional immigration area and stood in line, no one was there to help direct us on where to go.  Meanwhile, I counted 8 officers just standing around.  Finally, one of them came over and instructed us to line up our paperwork on a desk and have a seat.  When the guy was one stack away from ours, he disappeared.   Twenty minutes later a new lady walked up and stacked all the paperwork in the opposite order from the way the first guy had them.  Which meant the last folks to put their paperwork in line were the first ones helped.  We were cutting it close because of our delay, but we might have had a chance without going through this debacle.  Anyway, we missed our connection to St. Louis and when we tried to get a new flight there were only two options, one flight with two seats that left at 8pm and another flight at 10:30pm that had three available seats.  That was it and we were a group of six!  We decided to send Nicky and Liya on the 8pm flight (sometimes it pays to have motion sickness) and the rest of us rented a car and drove.  It turned out that there was bad weather in STL that delayed Nicky and Liya's flight so we wound up getting to the STL airport within minutes of each other.  That ended a very long 32 hours of traveling.  The good news is we made it home.  Thanks to the big welcoming committee that met us at the airport.   

 

Liya must like my driving or I had a few spare barf bags in my pockets because she made it home from the airport just fine.  Twenty minutes after we arrived home, she lost her first tooth!  Not sure if she's expecting the Tooth Fairy to pay in Yuan or US dollars.

Home safe and sound in her own bed. With panda and pillow pet on top of her.

 

On behalf of our entire family I would like to say thank you for following us throughout this process and a huge thank you to everyone that helped in so many different ways make this a reality.  Now the real journey begins!