Our journey to Thailand began on Thanksgiving Day, after staying with Samantha's family, Elaine and Paul. Paul drove his truck to the airport. The luggage in the back and the younger children in the front. The children had a great time singing for him much of the way to San Francisco. Jeff drove be Odyssey van with his mother, Susan as the co-pilot and Jubilee faithful and me and all the carry-ons. Susan parked and helped us as we checked in our luggage. We flew China Eastern Air, and as you can imagine, the line was full of Chinese people. ☺. We were glad to get there early because we needed to relax after the rush of preparing, driving, and checking in.
Passing through Security went just fine, and we ate lunch from sandwich and snack bags before we boarded the plane.
As we got on the plane we noticed there were many empty seats. A huge provision from God was that faithful had her own seat on the 13 our flight! Wow! Looking back I really don't know how we would have actually survived such a long flight with her on my lap.
The seats were bigger than the domestic flights we were used to. All the chairs had their own TV screens. It had movies, TV, Etc. The neat part for us was the little games they could play; Samantha spent her time helping the boys figure out different children games like memory, matching, and popping balloons. With little access to this kind of play in our regular life, this provided hours of help on the long flight.
And the food! I thought we would get one meal. I packed a whole carry on bag full of food thinking that we would be hungry. But shortly into the flight they fed us a meal, a few hours later a tuna sandwich, and then another meal 2 hours before landing. Jubilee sadly felt nauseous on the descent into the first stop in China, and finally vomited. We were glad for our flight was so smooth otherwise. Thank you Lord Jesus for taking such good care of our little flock!
