Wednesday, March 13, 2019 – Thursday, March 14, 2019

Due to the amount of travel that I do for work – I almost always try to just squeak in to the airport with as little time as possible before my flight. However, I don’t normally play around with international flights. Andy and I arrived at SFO with plenty of time before our 2:50PM flight.

Well, we were very wrong. We did not have enough time. As soon as we got out of our Lyft we immediately saw the long winding line for Air China’s kiosks. NO!

This was not a good sign. We get into line and wait our turn.

At this point about 30-40 minutes have been eaten up just waiting. Once we get to the counter it takes another 5-7 minutes to complete the check in process. It turns out that Air China does not honor TSA Pre-Check because that is an American program. (We thought they would at least honor it in SFO!)

This is not looking good – I still hadn’t put up my out of office for work!

We round the bend to see an extremely long line waiting to get through TSA.

I’m counting down all of the luxuries I had been counting on during what I thought would have been an extra hour and a half to dilly dally at the airport.

My out of office was not set up (my Type A personality was cringing), no bathroom break, no fancy lunch, and no champagne! After all, this was our actual anniversary day!

I can tell you a few things about traveling with me:

1. I need frequent bathroom breaks – and I drink a lot of water. I needed that bathroom break. (First stop).
2. I need food. I hadn’t much before taking off for the airport – we found some fancy kiosk and dropped about $31 for cold food… no champagne! But at least we got a cupcake!
3. We had barely gotten to the gate with our bagel, wrap, chips, and the cupcake when they were already calling our boarding group. (I won’t complain too much – I had been considering if our flight was delayed we would miss our connection to Thailand). While standing in line, I quickly put up my Out of Office message so the world could keep spinning without me!

Air China is a very nice airliner. The plane was huge and had a large selection of movies – I watched: Ralph Breaks the Internet, A Star is Born, Beauty and the Beast (with Emma Watson), and started Gone Girl. (If you’re doing the math I only briefly took a nap.)

We had a window seat on our flight from San Francisco to Beijing. We had some cool views – we flew over Alaska, Russia, and China. We saw a lot of snow capped mountains – and what we think was arctic tundra.

Once we landed in Beijing we quickly made it through the additional screening checkpoint – in other countries where we’ve had connections we’ve had to pick up our luggage and bring it through customs. We were very grateful that we were able to just head directly to our gate.

Similar to the rest of our travel – we made it with a few minutes to spare. This time around we were shuttled over to our plane and boarded from outdoors.

We met a wonderful couple on that flight – it turned out they were in our tour group. They are very much what I like to call “global citizens.” They currently live in California, but were originally from Europe. They still have family members spread across the globe. They get to travel a lot – and we got to talking about all of the places that we want to go.

Her husband was from Italy originally – and gave us very good advice for our upcoming Italy trip. Can’t wait to do more research on the city they told us about – and even advice for our second trip to Italy. (Because you can’t do it all in one trip!)

It’s always fun being able to open up a map and look at the globe. I want to see it all!

For now, I will have to be okay with Thailand and China on this trip.

The cupcake that we got to celebrate our five year anniversary!

Logistics:

• Air China (Flight)
• Centara Grand at Central Plaza (Bangkok)
• Affordable World (Bangkok)