Leaving for China on a Jet Plane on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008.

We will be traveling to Hangzhou as all children who are adopted in China are brought to the capital of the province. Hangzhou is the capitol of the Zhejiang Province. George is from Ningbo City which is a Port City on the Ocean near Shanghai.

We leave Thursday, May 22nd from Chicago, IL at 10:32 am. We have a non stop flight from Chicago to Shanghai. Our flight is on United 835 and there will be about 400 people on our plane too. Our flight is about 14 hours and 32 minutes. We arrive in Shanghai at 1:55pm on Friday, May 23rd. We cross the International date line and so we actually spring ahead 13 hours. If we didn't cross so many time zones we would be arriving at 1am in the morning Chicago time.

We will be staying overnight in Shanghai and leave for Hangzhou on May 24th. We will have a day to rest up before we meet George on Sunday, May 25th. The Director of EnMei SWI where George has lived most of his life, will bring him to meet us at the hotel. George will then stay with us at the hotel and we will bring him to his notarial appointments that we have before we can officially be his legal parents. In Hangzhou, we will be staying at the Jin Jiang Hotel. We hope to be given permission to visit EnMei, SWI in Ningbo City on Wednesday May 28th to tour the Children's Home and to hopefully hear a little more of his story from him through the Interpreter, and hopefully meet some of his friends and caregivers if possible. It will also be neat to see the area where George grew up and to take some pictures to share with him as he grows up.

We will fly to Guangzhou (Guangdong Province) on Friday, May 30th. That week we will have our visa appointment, George's medical exam and our swearing-in ceremony at the United States Consulate. There we will be staying at the Victory Hotel. All adoptive families come to Guangzhou as the only U.S. Consulate is located there. We will also be meeting up with two other families adopting through All God's Children International like we are that coincidentally, all three of us are adopting sons.

We will then fly home on Thursday June 5th. First we fly from Guangzhou at 9:35a and arrive in Shanghai at 11:55a on a Domestic China Southern Airlines flight requiring each of us to only have one checked bag weighing 40 pounds or less. Then we board our International flight United 836 leaving at 3:55pm and head back to Chicago. Our flight home is about 13 hours and 23 minutes. Again we cross the International date line and lose 13 hours and arrive home on June 5th at 4;16pm. That would mean we had made the whole flight in only 45 minutes. Which if we were not crossing time zones would mean that we arrived home at about 4am in the morning.