Viking Cruise: Imperial China: July 29

July 29: Headed Home In Style!

Typically a travel day home is not "worthy" of a full web page, but for Kim and I we looked forward to today's travel day almost like another excursion. Why? Because when we made the decision to add China to our original plan of Vietnam-Cambodia we were unable to book our flights through either Avalon or Viking. So we went through Expedia. I put into the search engine preferences that I wanted "Economy Premium" seats. And for some reason the flight that was put together for us included Business Class seats home and then FIRST Class on the final leg from Chicago. Yet, these top notch seats almost didn't happen! What?????

We enjoyed the last several days in China ribbing several of our new friends in our "Sticky Rice Family" who were on the same flight home from Beijing to Chicago that we'd wave to them through the curtain separating the "upper class" flyers like us from the "commoners" in the "steerage" of Economy class. So there were about eight of us who arrived smoothy at the Beijing International Airport about 7 am and Kim and I were acftually third in line to get boarding passes. We were early enough that the American Airlines workers were just arriving. But soon after we knew something was up as it was obvious that the computer system was down. To make a long story short the entire system was down and we waited for nearly two hours before the process began MANUALLY! We got up to the counter and the gal was filling out the boarding pass then passed me a form asking for my signature agreeing that we were not carrying anything illegal. And at the top there was a box that said, "Seats 29 E/F." I asked if those were our seats, she said yes and I emphatically said NO - we have "Business Class." And we had to have new boarding passes made out. Otherwise we'd have been back with the "riff raff" :) with all our pals. Because of the long boarding process we left about 90 minutes late. Not bad, but we only had 1 hour and fifty minutes between flights in Chicago so we were going to miss our connection. I was "concerned" about losing our first class seats, but my main concern was getting home as soon as possible. But when we got to Chicago everyone who had missed connections had their tickets wiating for them.....the good news we still had first class, the bad news was a six hour layover. Finally got home at about 10:30 pm. A long day but boy we enjoyed the Business Class flight - Kim literally slept for nearly eight of the twelve hours!