We Made It!

The flights went smooth and we have made it to China safe and sound! Four other families arrived a day early so we already have quite the crowd. More will arrive tomorrow with the rest arriving on Sunday. China is still celebrating Chinese New Year and we are witnessing that. We have heard fireworks from the moment we stepped foot off of our bus. Not just little ones the really big ones!!! We arrived at the hotel at 4pm and it is now 7pm and they are going strong. Our guide tells us they will probably go most of the night. Tomorrow is a free day and we are not sure what we will do. I'm sure we will come up with something good though. Please keep praying, only 4 more days until we meet Evan! Oh for those of you getting ready to travel I wanted to let you know you could read other blogs in Google reader as long as you don't open up to Blogger. :) I won't be able to respond but when I have some down time I'll be checking on all of you! Bob, Cheri & Taylor Noah, Kera and Lia I sure hope your behaving for Michele. We love and miss you very much!

Itinerary

Adoption Itinerary
February 18th – March 5th

• Thursday, Feb. 18th Arrive in Beijing
• Friday, Feb. 19th Free day in Beijing 
•  Saturday, Feb. 20th Beijing Sight-Seeing: Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Summer Palace
• Sunday, Feb. 21st Beijing Sightseeing: Church Service, Great Wall
                 Metcha Day!
•  Monday, Feb. 22nd Morning-flight to Chongqing
  Afternoon-Meet Evan LuBo
•  Tuesday, Feb. 23rd Civil Affairs Appointment
•  Feb. 24th – Feb. 25th Sightseeing & Shopping
•  Friday, Feb. 26th Flight to Guangzhou
•  Saturday, Feb. 27th Medical Exam
•  Sunday, Feb. 28th Free day in Guangzhou
•  Monday, March 1st Consulate Paperwork
•  Tuesday, March 2nd Consulate Appointment at 9:00 am
•  Wednesday, March 3rd Consulate Oath Taking Ceremony
•  Thursday, March 4th Pick-up Child’s Visa
   Depart from Guangzhou
•  Friday, March 5th Depart from Hong Kong

Our guides will be Maggie and Rosa in Beijing and Guangzhou and Michael in Chongqing. Ginny, I'm wondering if this is the same guide you had while in province. We should receive our travel items tomorrow via FedEx. :)

Testing

I almost forgot to try and do a test post and see if I would be able to blog while in China. See Blogger is banned and one must email their posts to their blog or have a great friend like Carla to update your blog for you. The picture is a map of China and you'll see a red dot where Chongqing is. That is Evan's province. Most know where Beijing is in the north and Guangzhou is in the Guangdong Province in the south. So this gives you a bit of an idea of where we will be going. To compare where we went on our last trip, Lia is from the Yunnan Province.

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Agency Closed.....Again

Our agency is really getting hit hard by this storm. It is expected to end tonight but I really do not expect anyone to be in the office tomorrow. Actually I'd be surprised if they went in at all this week. Which means we would get all of our travel items (passport, visas, and plane tickets) the day before we leave! *faint* Did I mention I'm feeling a bit stressed?!?! I'm trying to trust in the Lord but feeling a bit overwhelmed right now.

On a positive note we were able to fix our problems with Skype! I fix the problem on our main PC and a wonderful friend fixed it for us on the laptop! It was very easy but I had no clue what I was doing. LOL It will be great to be able to talk with our children when we are gone.

Please keep praying for us and our travel group.

2 Weeks

Can you believe it! In two weeks we will meet our Evan! Time is going by so fast and before we know it we will be on the plane flying to China. We are busy doing last minute preparations.

We will not receive our itinerary today as the agency was hit by that massive snow storm over the weekend and is closed for the day. We are praying we will receive it tomorrow. We know that at least two other families are arriving early as well as us.

We are having problems with Skype. :( I hope to have that fixed before we leave otherwise I'll be one sad momma! If anyone has any ideas or has BTDT let me know what worked for you. We leave in 9 days!

So Excited!

It's official, we have Rosa and Maggie for our guides! That made our day yesterday. We had both of them on our first trip to China as guides when we went in 2007 to adopt Lia and we'll have them again this time. We had our travel meeting yesterday. There were some problems with the phone lines so we have no idea if we have anyone going to province with us or not. We do know that there are older children being adopted but I'm not sure of the ages. We have a whooping 12 families in our group with the potential of one or two more families joining.

We are traveling during the most expensive time of the year. The bigger the group the better it will be for hotel discounts though. We should have our itinerary early next week. Wondering who our guide in province will be. It still seems unreal to me but I am excited and nervous all at once.

We are less than two weeks from leaving for China!

Travel Meeting

Can you believe we have our travel meeting Thursday! We are so excited! Time is just flying by so fast. We can't wait to find out if there is anyone else going to province with us and how many people are in our travel group. What we really want to know is who our guides will be. We're praying it will be Maggie and Rosa. If not then we will meet up with Rosa while we are in Beijing. :)

Next week we should receive our itinerary!