Well our long international nightmare is over.

Julianna, Sherry and I are all home, somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty hours late. Most of that was spent on airplanes. After the China Southern 777 out of Guangzhou had engine trouble (loud plane-shuddering engine trouble) we turned around and limped to Osaka, Japan—which took as much time as it would have to complete the flight to LAX with two engines.

Then the 150 or so of us (many of them adoptive families) were in quarantine for ten hours waiting for China Southern to supply us a solution. The Japanese airport folks made us go from the gate through the main terminal (a tram ride away) to herd us past a desk so we could each say we had no communicable diseases, and then we all took the tram back to the gate we had come from to sit and wait. We had no Japanese visas, so no leaving the terminal to at least see Osaka. Well, I mean we could see Osaka because the airport is on one of those man-made islands. But you get my meaning. This is when I got off the previous post, luckily they had WiFi and the laptop battery had some juice.

After a while somebody had disclosed a number we could dial on a pay phone to get an AT&T operator without actually having any Yen. Salvation! And there were two little shops that took U.S. Dollars and gave pocket change in Yen. So, buy a Coke, get some coins with holes in them as souvenirs.

When the new China Southern 777 arrived on the tarmac, the line began forming to board, made mostly of native Chinese (as we Americans were all too skeptical at this point). Sure enough there were a series of delay announcements because the Japan airport people decided it was neccessary to re-screen all our checked luggage for customs purposes. When they could have just transferred it all to the other plane and gotten rid of us. They took a plane full of luggage INSIDE to xray it and make sure it didn't pose a threat. This makes no sense to me, but there you go.

Once we finally got underway again we could take a nap and worry about the malaise at LAX. After all, we were a day late at this point. But the post is getting long and I need to sleep. sleeeep.....