Our Day in Tampa!

Well....It's 5:30 in the afternoon on Friday and we're still here in Tampa!

Thursday was a busy day finalizing lists, packing, etc.  Our weight limit for our luggage in China is 44lbs.  We started weighing our luggage at home (while holding my breath!), and they were of course over the weight limit.  We started with Caroline's suitcase.  We realized that a lot of the food we packed for Caroline weighed A LOT, and we could always go to Walmart in China if we needed to. So most of that was taken out. Now we were down to 43 lbs.  Then we moved on to ours.  We really tried to pack light to begin with, so we had no idea where to begin.  We narrowed it down to necessities, and magically made it to 44 lbs.!

My mom and stepfather helped us out by driving us over to Tampa last night.  After a great dinner at P.F. Chang's with them, and Brin and Savy, they dropped us off at our hotel.  We will miss the kids soooooo much! Two weeks is a long time to be away from them.  I know they'll be in very good hands with our families, but please pray for them while we're away. 

We wanted to be over here close to the airport because we had an early Friday morning flight.  Our hotel shuttle brought us to the airport at 6:00 this morning.  We started to have our luggage checked, and the baggage clerk took a look at our boarding pass.  It's never a good sign when you get the look he gave us.  He said our flight was delayed, and there was no way we were going to be able to make our connecting flight in Detroit.  My thoughts were, "Please Lord, our trip can't be starting like this."  We went to the ticket counter and the clerk told us we'd now be flying to LA, but we wouldn't be flying out until tonight! I began to panic inside....wondering about contacting our guide who is scheduled to meet us in Beijing, our hotel, and would this postpone our "Gotcha Day" to meet Caroline.  We were originally scheduled to arrive in China around 9:30 Saturday night.  Now we are arriving at 5:30 Sunday morning China time.  We coordinated with our agency... And they've taken care of all the details. Praise God!

Now it's almost 7:00, and we're getting ready to board our five hour flight to LAX.  Maybe we'll see some celebs while we're there!

We'll be leaving here at 7:30, arriving in LA 12:30 our time... 9:30 LA time. Jet lag.... Bring it! Whatever it takes us to get our Caroline!

Please pray for a safe flight!