Day One: Cookies and Conversation at 30,000 Feet

Friends, we are launched!  I write to you from the Delta Sky Lounge in Seattle, where the cheese is good and the cookies are nervous.  We have a few hours layover before our flight to Beijing.  Seattle, you ask?  Why Seattle?  Well, it turns out it's kinda hard to fly from San Diego to Beijing.  Seattle ended up being an attractive option.

I'm watching Jarrah and Joy playing a game on the iPad and enjoy some spaghetti.  They are similarly dressed in leggings and Skechers, their hair long and lightly mussed from the last flight.  So weird to think that when they came here on the reverse flight 11 years ago, it was a very different story, one in which my not-yet-walking 1-year-old spent most of the flight jumping in her seat and trying to tear the pages out of my book, reeking to high heaven as her fleece onesie was not able to fully mask a little incident that had occurred in the Guangzhou airport. 

Now she definitely wouldn't appreciate me sharing that little memory with you, but she'll forgive me in her unbridled excitement to be going back for this trip, accompanied by one of the seven families who--with us--made up CCAI's Group 906 on that previous trip.  That trip was mostly business first, meeting our group, then our baby, then a lot of screaming in hotel rooms punctuated by interludes of scintillating paperwork.  This trip already promises to be much different.

We will begin with a few days in Beijing, a typical gateway city that we missed last time, since we came through Hong Kong (that lovely place will need to wait until the next trip.)  Hoping to get some rest, a new release movie or two and possibly finish "The Poisonwood Bible."  (Soooo good!)

But first, this cheese isn't going to eat itself.