Day 1 - Toronto-Chicago -->

As excited as I was, I still slept like a baby the night before the big day. But at 5am when my alarm went off, I shot straight out of bed and ran upstairs. I wasn't totally finished packing -- the night before my mom told me not to bring my backpack -- but i couldn't resist, so i transferred some things over to my bag, like an extra pair of pants (in case it got cold on the airplane), sunglasses, PDA.. So by now one of the bags (not a carry-on) was mostly empty.

By around 5:30 everyone was up, scurrying around picking up things at the last minute.

The airport limousines showed up and we separated into two groups, me, darrl, dad, and then the other cab had mom and gramparents.

We got to the airport first though.. actually way faster. Dunno why our cab was so much faster..

At Pearson we saw Laura Fung's parents coming out, they were too far away to say hi to them though. We were taking United Airlines, but from Toronto to Chicago it was Air Canada. The flight to chicago was really short. I didn't even get a chance to fall asleep before we arrived. When we got to Chicago, we had to wait 4 hours for the transfer. I went into a convenience store and bought two packs of jellybellies for me and darryl to eat while we waited. But darryl got too excited and hungry, so he ate at the McD's in the airport. They have a lot more stuff at McD's than we do, including chicken wings..

While lining up for boarding, we saw Mark Cassidy, also on his way to China again, this time he was bringing a few students along to teach english. For those of you who never heard of Mark, he's a missionary. He's spoken at my old church a number of times.. he probably knows more chinese than i do.. or at least more dialects than I. He recognized my dad.

That was really cool, even though we were just on a family vacation, it got me all fired up that there were going to be missionaries on our plane, and they were going across to spread His Word!

hmm.. subconsciously it had me a bit worried about the flight, since you always hear those stories whenever a bad plane crash occurs, it's always when there are students or missionairies on board. so i did my regular airplane safety prayer, but more emphasis on this one since there were 'impt' people on board.


oh, the seats on the plane were sweet.. it took some trading, but eventually me and darryl were side by side. each seat had its own tv with 5-6 stations of non-stop movies. ours were better because we were just behind the wall so our tvs folded out (kinda like those tables in lecture hall seats).. whereas everyone else's tv's were directly in front of them on the back of the seat in front of them. plus with no chairs in front of us we got more leg room, we could stretch all the way out!

I watched Head Over Heels, Erin Brockovich (2.5 times), Proof of Life (1.5 times), Spy Kids (1.5 times), and some other movie, i can't remember anymore (maybe i should've written this log sooner!)