Yes, on Monday 5/12/08 morning, Beijing time, there was a 7.9 earthquake centered in the Sichuan province only about 200 miles South West of Xi'an city, the place where we will be going to get Megan. From news reports there was significant damage near the center of the quake, thousands of people have been killed and even more have been displaced or left homeless. It has been days of more and more bad news from the towns in the Sichuan province, our thoughts are with them.

Our Monday at home was spent packing and trying to contact Amanda to make sure that all was well with Megan and the other children. It took a while, but started receiving emails from Amanda that all was well. Some damage was incurred at the home where Megan is, but none of the children were hurt. That was one big WHEW.

So we took off on Tuesday morning from St. Louis to Chicago.  If you local folks hear of four passengers breaching yet another security measure at the STL airport.. it was us. We almost boarded the plane without even having a boarding pass. We thought we had what we needed. The security guy questioned what we had, but took our word for it that we were booked on the flights. Go to get on the plane and they started asking us how we even got through security without a boarding pass. Whew #2.

The weather broke enough for us to get from STL to Chicago after a slight delay, then another delay in Chicago.. "a maintenance issue" and excessive baggage. Yeah we contributed to the excessive baggage problem. So off we went.

The flight was only 12 hours instead of the 14 we first thought it was going to be, which is the difference between going from Chicago vs. Newark. We think the maintenance issued had to do with the fact that the front of the place was extremely hot, while the rear was extremely cold, and they couldn't fix it. We were of course hot. Nothing exciting on the flight. Did get the pictures of the ice flows that we flew over last time.

 The one thing that still is hard to say is that we left STL on 5/13 at around 10:40am, arrived in Beijing on 5/14 at 3:15pm China time and never saw the sun go down. Yep, we followed the setting sun right around the curve of the earth. Pretty cool.

We meet with Maggie, who will be our tour guide tomorrow. Sorry, but I didn't sleep but maybe an hour on the flights so I'm not going to do pics today. I just don't have the energy.