This is your captain speaking...

Beijing China

There is nothing like waking up on a long flight and looking up on the televison screen and seeing that we are hovering over our intended destination, and thinking yeah the longest part of our trip is over!! We made it out alive with a 3 year old!! Woo Hoo!!!  It was a good feeling.

Then just when the reality sinks in that we are about to be on American soil, the dreaded words sound out from the intercom; "This is your captain speaking and due to a thunderstorm in Chicago we are being diverted to the  Rockford airport".  Boo - these are not the words we want to hear, our hearts just sank we were in the last few minutes of our 15 hour flight! How can this be?

So how do you explain to a little fella that we can't get off the plane.  We are so close yet so far away. Yep Good times!!

Beijing China

After re-fueling and sitting on the runway for about 3 hours we were finally awaiting to be cleared for take-off.  This big Boeing 747 is getting smaller by the minute and at this point I am just trying to find my happy place.  We are only about 60 miles from Chicago O'Hare which should only take about 15 minutes to get there by air. 



Chicago IL and Lake Michigan

The next big hurdle is getting through the long lines at customs and then on to immigration but because of the storm hundreds of flights were affected.  There's people everywhere, lining the walls sitting in the floor waiting to find out what happened to their flights.  I think they changed our flight to a different gate about 7 times before we finally made it back to the original gate that we were supposed to fly out of.  We were suppose to leave at 8pm central time but of course that was delayed for a couple of hours.  Even as exhausted as we were we got to hang out with some nice people in our wait.