We're back, one small person larger, to continue on this ever crazier
experiment in world travel with kids. Our daughter, Baby C (7 months
old), joins her brother, little D (almost 21 months old), in the
craziest family she doesn't even know she's part of yet.
On top
of this I broke my ankle at the beginning of December. This trip got
shortened and downscaled (it was supposed to be up to Laos to visit a
friend and check one off the bucket list), and the doctor gave approval
to start weight bearing 6 days before the trip, so we decided to go
ahead anyway - not only to take two under two to Asia, but to do it with
a gimpy Mommy.
The story on how the trip came to be is a mistake
fare. It was a pricing error quoted in Myanmar kyats at the "floated
currency" rate after the currency had been devalued. So we ended up
with a sweet round trip from Myanmar to the States in business class for
pretty cheap, the caveat being that the trip had to originate in
Myanmar. So we booked a one-way out to Hong Kong, and it being January
with really low flight loads, were able to redeem four Global Premier
Upgrades and get us all into Business Class on the way out, too.
Chicago-Hong
Kong is flown on a 747, and we were in business class. There are two
4-packs of seats (with two rear facing and two forward facing) next to
the aft galley. The downside is, it's loud and busy, and if you are a
business traveler looking for a restful flight experience, you should
not want to sit here. The upside is that if you are a family of four
with two small children, these seats are perfect! They are far away
from *everything*, especially the rest of business class where
passengers might not like to be disturbed.
Traveling with kids
is just made exponentially easier. There's a lot more room to spread
out toys and supplies, everybody has their own space. The kids did
great. C slept a long time in her car seat, lulled by the white noise
and vibration. D ate like there was no tomorrow. He took a bit of a
long time to wind down enough to sleep on the lie-flats, even though we
had talked about "a bed on a plane" for about a week. He ended up
wanting to fall asleep in daddy's arms, then transferring over to the
bed. Finding Nemo helped a lot. He got about 6 hours or so of sleep on
the flight, and woke up as breakfast was being served.
We took a
mechanical delay out of Chicago, which delayed us about an hour, when
we only had about 2hr5min of connect time in HKG in the first place.
Because of the crazy way we booked this (one way flight to HKG
connecting to intra-asia award to BKK), we weren't sure how this would
play out. After we claimed the stroller at the top of the jetbridge and
came down the ramp, there were two agents yelling for Bangkok
passengers. They asked me who I was and lo and behold, my name was on
their list! We had checked a bag all the way through, and apparently,
that's how they saw my "connection." Boris the Agent then escorted us
through security and all the way around to the Thai boarding gate. He
coordinated with the Thai agents to get boarding passes printed, seats
assigned, and checked bag located, all while flirting charmingly with
Miss C. He was awesome.
The downside of this is that I had to
practically run the length of HKG on my gimpy ankle. That wasn't so
good. But we made it. The Thai flight was awesome, even with tired
kids, who were lap children on this particular flight. We were so proud
of them.
Upon arrival in Bangkok, we found our bag on the
baggage carousel, in spite of the delay into HKG - awesome. And then it
was a cab ride downtown to the Grand Hyatt Erawan, where after getting
installed into our 1 bedroom suite and a light snack, everyone fell
blissfully asleep for a solid 5 hours.
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