The dreaded Flight!

First off, sorry for the delay in posting this update… We had our computer “tuned” before the trip, and it wiped out some info including how to get into the admin part of this site… couple that with the fact that it’s been none stop action since we left, and it all tallies up to a late post.

So, I suppose I should recap our (more than 24 hrs) travel from point A (Toronto), to point B (Siem Reap, Cambodia).
We had a fantastic “send off” dinner with all the grandparents and my brother near the airport before checking in 3 hours before our flight. We checked in a little earlier because when we booked our flight through SkyScanner, they put us in 4 random single seats… Although that seemed like a good plan to me, Lisa and the girls thought we should sit together. 😉 We ended up with all 3 seats beside the window, and the adjacent seat across the isle.
The plane rose from the Pearson airport tarmac at about 1230 PM, and the girls, who’s excitement outweighed their fatigue, raced to select from the menu of movies available. The outcome predictable…..Disney’s move “Frozen”.

As excited as I was for this adventure, I was dreading the flight to the other side of earth. I thought that, at some point, I’d want to open the hatch and plunge, but it really wasn’t so bad. Lisa and I barely slept at all, but the girls were great, they slept like 3 and 5 yr old kids. So it could have been much worse. Before the flight, I was asked quite a lot…. “you’re flying straight from T.O. to China?? do you go east or west?” Of course I would respond as usual… “No Idea”! 🙂 Turns out we flew north! We flew northeast until we were heading southeast, and dropped down right over Russia, past Yakutsk (which I found cool due to my fondness of the board game RISK), to our layover in Guangzhou, China.

Now, we were scheduled to fly about 17hrs to Guangzhou, but managed it in only 15.5hrs. Great news right? Wrong! Our connecting flight was on time of course. So, instead of a 3 hour layover, we were starring 4.5 hours right in the face. We didn’t bring any Yen with us, and apparently the Chinese weren’t in the mood to accept USD in exchange for goods and services… not even McDonald’s. At this point, Lisa and I were very tired, and the girls were NOT! We did, however convince one shop to provide us with one cup of tea, and a bottle of water for $12 USD… we were not thinking clearly. It was before business hours there, and the currency exchange place wasn’t open yet.

We survived the layover, and took off to Siem Reap. The (relatively) short 2hr flight saw the girls totally passed out again, and Lisa and I a little out of sorts (Although they did serve a nice breakfast with tea/coffee).

As the tires touched down in Siem Reap, the girls were groggy from being in a DEEP sleep, and Lisa and I functioning on excitement and wonderment. We made it here, now lets see what happens next…