Trip Home

Packing to get home turned out to be a lot tougher than I had originally thought. Since my bag was overweight on the way out to Beijing, I figured that I would have to leave some stuff behind to get the stockpile of souvenirs I've amassed home. It's also a lot harder to get a duffel bag in Beijing than I first thought. I hate traveling with two checked bags, mostly due to the fact that I've had bad luck with lost luggage in the past. This time though, there was no way I could get everything home in my one bag, even when it's as massive as my luggage is.

So after packing my bag in a way that would probably make my mother ashamed of me, everything was in order for the trip home. Chris and I tried to make one last trip to Paul's for breakfast Tuesday morning, but cabs are harder to come by each day as the end of our trip comes and we didn't want to take the subway again, so that plan fell through. That meant nothing but a couple more going overs around the room to make sure nothing was still left out of my bags. I freak out about those things, so it wasn't the most fun in the world.

We discovered another great part about having an Olympics credential, as we got to bypass the normal check-in lines and all of our bags got Olympic tags on them. In the words of the volunteer who helped me, it was so they took extra special care of my bags. I love this kind of treatment.

So I've still got lots of Chinese yuans in my pocket, and with several hours still remaining until my flight, I stopped by the airport bar. Now people have written stories and sung songs about random people that you can meet at an airport bar, but I've never experienced it. Today I started talking to an older gentleman about what we were doing at the Olympics, and it turns out he is the president of the canadian amateur boxing association. We talked for a while about boxing, cycling and Johnny Cash, and the hours ended up passing by pretty fast. It was just another story among the pile of others that I've worked up over the weeks in Beijing.

The plane trip back from Beijing to San Francisco was a lot worse than the trip out to Beijing. The excitement on going to another country during the Olympics helped the earlier flight, and it wasn't a crowded flight. The way back was packed in cheek to cheek, and instead of chairs, the Air China plane featured individual sized torture machines. OK, the controls for the in-flight movie volume are on the inside of the armrest and they protrude about an inch-and-a-half into my thigh. 12 hours of that was terrible. I was ready to jump out of the plan right around when we hit Alaska.

Everything else went well, as both planes from San Fran to Milwaukee and from Milwaukee to Indy were on time. It's amazing how easily one can deal with a four four flight right after you get off a plane you spent 12 hours on. I also probably came as close to flying privately as I ever will on the flight from Milwaukee to Indianapolis. It was only a 40 minute flight on a small jet, and it had only 10 people on it. No waiting for the carousel to spit out the bags either, because with only a couple people having bags, they're already waiting for us by the exit.

I heard that a couple other Purdue students had definite issues getting out of Beijing with delayed flights, and a couple are even stuck in other cities in the U.S. over night, so I'm pretty happy with how my travels worked out. It's nice to be back home.

This will likely be my last post, so I want to thank my family and friends for keeping up with my travels on the blog. Also, all the readers from the Noblesville Ledger, thanks for reading my adventures, because I had a great time telling them to you. Hopefully you can look for me in the future, but for now I'm out of the blogging business. Thanks again.