Hong Kong........

So now that we've arrived at the airport the only thing to do now is wait. Wait to see if the next flight to Hong Kong has any available seats. Since Drake and I hadn't really slept, we were really tired. So we ended up setting our luggage down on the ground and taking a nap right in the middle of the terminal. People walking all around us but it didn't matter, we were out. We slept for about an hour.
We woke up and started tossing a tennis ball back and forth until I put together a game. You know those moveable posts with those straps that connect to eachother to make up the maze of lines that you find at the airports? Well we got two of those and put them together in the middle of the terminal and started playing a game of tennis, but without rackets just our hands. Nobody seemed to mind. A group of security guards even walked by and asked us what the score was. Another traveler was taking video of us as he walked by. Entertain ourselves while entertaining others in the process.
The next flight to Hong Kong was at 2:00 pm and when they called out the names of selected stand-bys, ours weren't called. There were two more flights leaving that night, one at 9:00 and the other at 12:00. Our first attempt for the stand by was doomed from the start since we were like the 36th and 37th names on the list. But this time we supposedly first in line, but its a full flight so we'd just have to wait and see what happens, no guarantees.
We ended up taking a free hotel shuttle to the In n'Out just outside of LAX, hung out there for a bit, and played a game of cribbage. Drake was able to get a hold of some friends from church, Aaron and Mariah, that live nearby that were happy to come swing by and pick us up for a few hours.
Later they dropped us off back at the airport and we soon found out that we made it on the flight. Finally, we're making some progress on our trip, actually making it on to a flight. The only bad thing was that we left the tennis ball at Aaron's house, but then we remembered that we had a case of them in the suit case of toys for the orphans, so we had to pull out a few for our entertainment.

The flight from Los Angeles to Hong Kong is 15 hours, by far my longest flight. Since we were stand by we didn't get seated next to eachother. Originally when I booked our flight months ago I tried to reserve seats in the emergency exit isly because you get extra leg room, but those seats are usually reserved first. But I got lucky with my seats placement, thats right, emergency isle baby. And with my dead leg that I've had for going on 3 weeks now, this will be much needed.
Cathay Pacific is a really nice airline. Seats were comfortable, service was great, the two meals that we got were great, and every seat had their very own screen with probably 100 movies and tv shows to choose from. The flight for both of us was rather pleasant and passed quickly enough. We both slept thru a good portion of it.
We arrived in Hong Kong Wednesday morning, so that means we missed a whole day, left Los Angeles Monday night, arrive in Hong Kong Wednesday morning.
Our connecting flight to New Delhi wasn't leaving until 2:30 pm and that would also be a stand by flight, so we had a good 7 hours to spend until then. We decided to leave the airport and go to the island of Hong Kong. We checked in our luggage at an airport locker, took a train to the island, and then took a taxi to Lan Kwai Fong.




We're not too interested in the touristy stuff so we wanted to go check out downtown and get some local food. Stopped by a place and had a pork and vegetable soup and then a breakfast dish with fried eggs, mushed not mashed potatoes, and sweet beans and some sort of hot sweet milk to drink.
Next we went downtown to check out some street vendor stuff and some of the sights of the city.





(Apparently there were a lot of motorcycles jumping over cars so they had to put a stop to it by putting up these "No Jumping Over Cars with your Motorcyle" signs.)
We took a taxi back to the train station and the train back to the airport in time for us to find out that we again didn't make it on the 2:30 flight. But she put us on the list for the 9:15 flight, which means more time waiting in the airport. We sat around a bit and then decided to go and talk to a different worker to see if they could work their magic any better. I have no idea what those workers are doing when they try to get us on a flight, but whatever it is they sure type fast in the process. Every worker we talked to always asked us the same questions and we always had the same disappointing answer: Do you have an itinerary? No. Do you have a boarding pass? No. All we had was a little baggage claim sticker with a bar code. Our one checked bag was scheduled to be on the 9:15 pm flight, so our goal was to be on the same flight as our bag. The next guy we talked to was a champ and was able to do better than just stand by and booked us two seats, next to eachother even, on that flight.
So now we can relax, we know that we're on the next flight to India, no more stand by stress. Its now Wednesday and I hadn't showered since Saturday night and it was starting to catch up with us. They had showers there that you could use but it costs $20. So we decided to ghetto shower and just get butt naked in the public bathroom and use the hand soap and the sinks to clean ourselves up. There was this old man in there mopping the floor who didn't look too happy. I don't know if he wasn't happy because he was going to have to clean up our mess or the fact that he wasn't happy that he was having to watch to bearded naked men showering in the sinks. Ghetto but refreshing nonetheless.
We filled the next few hours with games with the raquetballs and convincing other travelers that we were wheelchair-ridden. I have to say that we were pretty convincing though. Later on the flight people on the plane would make eye contact with us, recognize where they had seen us before and then say "you can walk".
P.S. While we were in downtown Hong Kong we saw a ton of people but only one man with a beard, either beards aren't too common or asian men can grow them well. Later in the airport a waitor asked us if our beards were real. Ha.
Next stop New Delhi, India.........

Preparations for My Trip to India........

First things first, define procrastination. If you'll look it up in the dictionary, most likely you'll find a picture and me and Drake. We've known about our India trip for months now and still we left our preparations to the last minute.
I arrived in Ventura on Sunday, the day before our departure. We meet up at the mall and get right down to it. We're buying toys and underwear for the 23 orphans that we'll be spending time with while there in India. We go to Target, FootLocker, WalMart, Sports Chalet, Fry's, back to WalMart, and finally back to Target. Now we've got everything we need, now all we need to do is eat and organize everything in our luggage.
We get back to the house and deal with the eating situation first, of course. Our plan is to leave the house in the morning at 6:15 am. We're most likely not going to get too much sleep but we'll have plenty of time to sleep on the plane so we're not too worried about that. It's around 1 am and I start thinking about everything that I'm going to need to start packing when it hits me. When planning a trip, what is the number one thing you have to take with you? Toothbrush? Underwear? While these things are very important, its still not what I'm referring to. Let me rephrase the question. When planning an INTERNATIONAL trip, what is the number one thing you HAVE to take with you? That's right, my freaking PASSPORT. The very same one that is calmly sitting in a small pocket in my backpack which is in TAFT!!!!!

Taft is 2 hours away, we're leaving in 5 hours, we still haven't even touched anything to begin packing, so we have to leave now. We jump in Matt's car, the Lexus, which will get us there the fastest and the safest. As we're pulling out of the driveway I ask Drake how much gas we have, he takes a look and sees that we have plenty to get us there and back no problem. We decide to take the 33 back to Taft because even if you don't drive really fast its still faster and shorter. A bit more dangerous but when has that ever stopped us? Its been raining all weekend and we soon find out that there are a lot of little mud rock slides that have fallen in to the road which give us little obstacles, but nothing we can't handle. Drake is pretty tired, kind of delirious, but getting the job done safely so far. He looks down at the dash and notices a new light that has been illuminated. Yup, its the gas light.

When Drake has glanced at how much gas we had he read the gauge wrong thinking we had close to a full tank we in reality we had close to an empty tank.
So now we've found ourselves right in the middle of Ventura and Taft with no close gas station, no cell phone reception, and no time to run out of gas. Somehow Drake manages to use what little fuel we have left very efficiently on the up hills and coast our way down on the down hills. We make it to the Texaco station in Maricopa with the needle pointing well below E.
So we book it the rest of the way to Taft, grab my passport, and head back to Ventura, this time on the much safer Interstate 5. At this point Drake is beyond sleepy, he's unable to complete full thoughts or sentences and claims to be seeing things on the road that aren't really there. After the "face out the window scream" and the several slaps to the face that I deemed necesary to give him at random times we decided that I should drive. When we're driving through Oxnard I get a voicemail informing us that our flight from Chicago to Brussels has been cancelled due to a massive slow storm in Europe. I call the airlines and they tell us the soonest they can get us there in by the 25, Christmas Day, yeah right.
So we arrive at the house in Ventura at 6:05 am, still not having even packed a single sock. So we get right to it, pack our bags until they're full and hope that we got the essentials. Our plan was to leave by 6:15 but we agree now on a much more realistic 6:45, to make it there early enough for our flight leaving at 9:50. Our buddy Kevin shows up to take us to LAX and we take off. You know how we don't like things that are too easy and how we love a challenge, so what does that mean? More hurdles. We run into a detour and also traffic. But we arrive at LAX at 9:15. We don't necesarily have to make our flight to Chicago since we will most likely be rerouted anouther way.
After talking with some not-too-pleasant representatives from American Airlines, we find out that all flights to Europe are cancelled and they will be sending us through Hong Kong flying stand-by with Cathay Pacific.

Hong Kong here we come..............