Day 1 - Travelling to the other side of the world!

It’s been a day full of travelling.  Leaving for the Winnipeg airport at 4:30am from home, you feel that there can’t possibly be anyone else up at that hour.  Yet when we got to the airport, it was full of people getting set to travel the world.  That’s how it was this morning.  We all arrived excited, nervous, anxious, sleepy, and ready for this tour to begin.  Parents were seeing their kids off, and kids were getting to know their chaperone groups and already scheming about what they were going to do on the tour.  We all knew, this was going to be a great adventure.

The flight to Vancouver was uneventful, which is just as well.  Everyone got choose from a fairly narrow selection of on board movies and snacks.  Once in Vancouver we had three hours before our next flight.  I don’t think anyone took the time to catch up on any sleep.  We were all saving that for the flight to Shanghai.  However, there was an inordinate number of singers getting a bite to eat at A&W upon arrival at 8am.  Their metabolisms are a little higher than mine I think.

In a word, the flight to Shanghai was long.  11.5 hours, travelling at nearly 1000 km/h, the sun never went down.  We were all excited to fly on Air Canada’s new and much talked-about Dreamliner airplane, the Boeing 787.  Other than some fancy mood-lighting, entertainment options at each seat, plugin abilities for personal devices, crazy curved wings, and futuristic tinting abilities on all the windows, it’s still much like any other plane.  And 11.5 hours in one seat is still a long time.

We loaded into our two tour buses and headed for the hotel followed by dinner at a wonderful Chinese restaurant.  Everything was already prepared for us and we had the whole restaurant to ourselves.  A great way to start the tour!