T-Minus 7 days and counting

We purchased our tickets, reserved our hotels, have our consulate appointments, and are packing.  One week from right now we should be with Hudson and he has no idea as to what he is in for.  On Saturday January 5th we take an early flight to Washington D.C.  From there we have a flight to Beijing and from Beijing we fly to Chengdu.  We will be in Chengdu for 5 days and then leave for Guangzhou.  After our appointments in Guangzhou we take a van to Hong Kong for a direct flight to Chicago.  Believe it or not I am tired already and we haven't even flown yet!    Trevor and Garrett will be going with us this time and they are totally excited.  Garret has already said he is very nervous about the flights because he doesn't want to feel the pressure on his ears.  I assured him that he will mostly feel the pressure during ascending and descending.

When in Guangzhou we wont be able to stay at the hotel we had first time around.  Its been under construction for a very long time and isn't taking any reservations.  This led us to take advantage of a lot of Marriott points and get a hotel paid for by our frequent stays during my work travels and our fire displacement. 

We have been overwhelmed by what we have to do since moving back into our house and also planning for this trip.  We have had friends John and Brenda that have showed up almost every night the last week to "encourage" us to keep making progress.  Without them we would probably be sitting in a pile of unopened boxes.  Today John helped me clear out the last items from our MiBox portable storage unit.  This was a huge help as we want our driveway back!  Hopefully the great guys at MiBox can get us on the schedule early this week. 

I will through in a shameless plug for MiBox.  The guys there were great to work with.  When they heard that we had a fire they quickly got two large portable storage boxes delivered to our house so we could fill them with the contents of the house that didn't go to service master.