A long journey

Bob and I set off on Saturday morning for our long stretch of flying. I had bought the tickets from Cathay Pacific and couldn't verify the flight status on Saturday morning for our leg from Minneapolis to Chicago, so I was a little worried that changes could have happened to the time, etc. We arrived at MSP and checked in at American (who I knew operated the flight to ORD) and they assured us we were in the right spot and gave us our boarding passes, checked through all of the way to Taipei.

We stopped at a few stores, exchanged money (part Taiwan, part Hong Kong, part Chinese) which took a loooong time, and then started towards the gate. As we walked down the concourse we heard the dreaded "Will 2 passengers Waitz proceed immediately to gate E14". Holy smokes! We ran to the gate and when we sat down I looked at the boarding pass again. I realized our flight was leaving a full 30 minutes earlier than my original itinerary. I never heard from Cathay Pacific about this, so it was a good lesson learned. Always always find a way to verify flight status the day before. Fortunately we like to arrive at the airport early so we were okay, but we were very close to missing the check-in window. Yikes!

The flight to Chicago was normal and we had to change terminals there, so another long security line. That's a good lesson if you're flying internationally through ORD - leave a lot of time between flights.

The plane to Hong Kong was big and really nice. It was a much nicer flying experience than the international flights I have taken on Delta, etc. The food experience was mostly great. We had a menu to pick from three options for both meals (which were, basically, dinner). I loved my first meal so much I took a picture of the after:

(shrimp cocktail, pasta with red pepper sauce, roll, a mini icecream and apparently unlimited wine)

The seats were pretty comfy, too.  Even Bob's long legs had an inch of room.  The entertainment options were plenty (I think I watched 10 movies) and surprisingly the time flew by.  Our flight attendant was excellent.  Aside from the earlier snafu with the reservation changes, I am a big fan of Cathay Pacific.

We had a few hours layover in Hong Kong and then we finally started on the last leg of our flight - Hong Kong to Taipei.  A journey that started at 11:25 on Saturday morning was going to be complete at 12:05 am on Monday morning (Taiwan time).

Our hosts in Taiwan, Bob's brother Carl and our sister-in-law Chi-tsai graciously set up a ride for us with their favorite taxi driver.   He met us outside of customs (which was a breeze, we already like Taiwan at this point) and drove us about 45 minutes to their apartment.  

Finally, some time after 1:00 am, we arrived to see Carl and Chi-tsai waiting for us outside.   Home sweet home for the next few days!  As much as we wanted to visit, we had a quick tour of the apartment and called it a night.