Day 21 Flying home

We arrived at the airport in time to be near the front of the line for check in, which is important when you fly Air China. They don't allow early seat selection and it's first come first served. At least we were able to select seats on our flight from Beijing to San Francisco. NOT!

We were late getting into Beijing, so they had a special bus to take us to the check-in. When we actually got to the gate to check-in, the attendant tried to change our seats, but we told her we wanted it the way we had arranged it. Of course, when we got on the plane, one of our assigned seats were already taken--by someone who was also assigned that seat. It turned out to be great though, because the we ended up with a row all to ourselves -- and we were in front of the wing! As Paul said, this was the best situation we could have had. There was a very long line of planes waiting to take off from the Beijing airport, but we finally got in the air and had an uneventful trip home. Even though it was a 12 hour flight, we were able to relax a little because of the empty seat in our row and it went very quickly.

It was exciting to see the California coast and the Golden Gate bridge as we arrived in San Francisco! The trip was wonderful and we loved just about everything about it, but it was definitely good to get home.