The first part of our journey home was good, the second part...not so much.
Thursday we met our guide and received Ellie's immigration visa, her Hague adoption certificate, and the very important brown envelope for immigration. Our guide arranged a van to take us to Hong Kong, so we left Guangzhou at noon and arrived in Hong Kong a little before 3pm. The drive was really nice. In China we saw a lot of industrial cities and Hong Kong was beautiful, like a tropical mountain area. The hotel was connected to the airport, so that was convenient. For dinner we walked over to the airport and it's this whole big mall situation. We walked around for a while and ate dinner there before walking back to the hotel. The next morning we boarded our flight for Newark. Ellie did pretty well on the flight, only crying a few times and sleeping for about 5 hours total of the almost 16 hours. Tom and I didn't sleep. When we arrived in Newark we were relieved, tired, and excited to get through immigration and on to Greensboro to see our boys. Immigration went much more quickly than expected. The officer told us we would receive her green card in the mail. I corrected him that she should receive a Certificate of Citizenship. His response was "Yeah, Yeah, that's right". So I guess we'll see what happens! The guy at the consulate in China already prepared us that the customs officers aren't as familiar with processing citizenship, so he told us it could happen that they say "green card". He said usually the right thing comes to your home, but he did tell us what to do if it doesn't.
Our layover was almost four hours, so we settled in the waiting area. Flight after flight kept getting cancelled due to "air traffic control". When our flight was supposed to begin boarding we learned that it had been cancelled. We were devastated. Tom stood in the customer service line for over an hour before learning we couldn't get a flight until the next evening. He had them check Raleigh, Charlotte, Roanoke, Charlottesville, Columbia, and Charleston. Nothing. United gave us a few meal vouchers and sent us to a sketchy hotel. We thought about finding another hotel, but at that point we had been awake for 27 hours and just wanted to sleep. We didn't see any bedbugs and the sheets at least looked clean, even if the room wasn't, so we all took an appropriate dose of melatonin and crashed. Surprisingly, we all slept decently. My mom was able to talk to United for us, who said the flight to Greensboro today wasn't looking good. Somehow she convinced them to buy us American Airlines tickets for today. So that's the plan. We left the hotel early even though our flight isn't until 3:30 because it would be better to wait around the airport than the hotel. We missed our Delta flight to Jacksonville from Greensboro today, but the travel agent was able to work something out. We will leave from Raleigh tomorrow morning.
When I called Graham to tell him about our flight last night I knew he wouldn't understand a flight being cancelled, so I told him the airplane was broken and we couldn't get on it. He said "Oh no Mommy. They fix it". Poor boy. First thing he asked me this morning was if the airplane was fixed today. We haven't made any promises.
Somehow, our checked baggage did make it to Greensboro this morning. The benefit of that is that since my parents live five minutes from the airport they went and picked it up and my mom is washing all our clothes. Thanks mom!
So now we wait and pray we can at least make it to North Carolina today. So far it looks like our flight will happen.
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