Getting to the Philippines

This has been quite an ambitious adventure. :) We are here in the Philippines now and we all arrived safely and things honestly worked out pretty well, though it was quite a lot of work to get here. We brought with us three little kids, Chad's mom, five suitcases, five bags, and a big two seat stroller. We flew in three planes, took two taxi vans, and a boat, and traveled for about 36 hours.

We started out at the SLC airport - we showed up way too early, but that's ok. We had plenty of time to ride the moving sidewalks over and over and eat dinner. We flew to LA in a little plane - maybe 50 passengers? Claire was super wired the whole time and kept me busy - which made that flight go by in a flash!

On the way to LA

We got on the flight to Hong Kong at midnight CA time (1 am MST). Because Hong Kong is 15 hours ahead of CA and the plane went more or less with Hong Kong time, we got served dinner a couple hours after getting on the plane. After that we sort of slept - Jozie and Haven did pretty well with about 7 hours of sleep. The adults got a few hours here and there. :) My seat had a fold out shelf in front of it to strap a bassinet to for Claire, which was cool. Claire and I sat by some super nice people who are from China but live in LA. Their English isn't that great so we made up for it with lots of smiles. They helped me by holding Claire when I needed to do stuff and were just really really nice. We got to Hong Kong early in the morning and the airport was basically empty - so we got to play on the moving sidewalks some more! A few hours later we flew for an hour and a half to Manila.

Waiting for our flight to Hong Kong

 In the Hong Kong Airport

We are really kind of crazy, because the fun wasn't over yet, and with all the kids and suitcases in tow we arrived in Manila at 10 am, found a shuttle van to take us down south, and drove for about two hours to Batangas. Then (the fun still wasn't over!) we figured out what ferry we needed to take to get to Sabang (pronounced Sah-bong) in Puerto Galera, hoped we could find where we were staying from there because we'd been unable to connect with our host and cell service was pretty lousy, and got in an awesome boat (with all that luggage!) and rode across the channel for another couple hours. To our relief our super nice host was there at the shore ready to pick us up, and we drove to his house, where we're staying in a basement apartment. We arrived at 3 or 4 in the afternoon and were pretty wiped! This nice family made us some spaghetti and we went to bed. :)

Getting on the boat to Sabong

Quite a great picture considering how long we'd been traveling at this point!!