We are finally in the home stretch until travel, and all of our travel plans are in place.  Whew!

We will depart Nashville on the morning of September 6, 2012.  We connect through Minneapolis to Tokyo, then Tokyo to Hong Kong. The boys have already fully plotted out a sushi meal at the Tokyo airport so that they can say they ate sushi in Japan.  

We will land in Hong Kong the evening of Friday September 7th, at about 11 pm local Hong Kong time.  Saturday, September 8th we will tour Hong Kong and fight jet lag.  On Sunday September 9th we will take a two hour train ride from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, China.  We should arrive in Guangzhou at 3 pm on Sunday.

While in Guangzhou, we will be staying at the Garden Hotel.  We will have Sunday afternoon to get settled into the hotel, and on Monday, September 10th, we will finally meet Alexa for the first time!  

After that, our days will be filled with adoption appointments to complete paperwork, medical exams, obtain passports and visas.  We will have a few scattered days between appointments to tour the city and get a feel for what Alexa's birth country is like.  We hope to spend one day traveling about three hours by car to Jiang Cheng to visit her orphanage and see the town where she spent her first 2 1/2 years.  On Tuesday, September 18th we have our appointment at the Consulate in Guangzhou, our last official appointment of the process.  We should receive her passport and visa on September 19th, at which point we are free to fly out to Beijing that evening.

We will arrive in Beijing after midnight the morning of September 20th.  Because we are traveling partially on frequent flyer points, we could not get flights home until September 22nd.   We will spend two days in Beijing seeing the Great Wall of China, the Forbidden Palace, and some of the Olympic Venues from 2008.  We leave Beijing the morning of September 22nd and will arrive home mid-morning on September 23rd.

Lord willing, I will be updating the blog with pictures of our adventure and sharing how the trip is progressing.  We greatly appreciate your prayers and support for our journey to become the Jenkins Party of 7!