After many days of packing parties and last minute preparations, we woke up on Monday, Jan 11th and started packing the van. Our friend Steve rented and drove a van to help take us and our 19 bags of checked luggage. In addition, Jacquelyn’s mom drove her van and Jacquelyn’s niece Sonja joined us as we made our way to JFK. Including our carry-on luggage, we made the trek with 25 bags.

The checkin process went easier than expected. Because we had a small baby, they put us in the special line, which we were thankful for so we didn’t have to snake through the already long line with our more than 1000 lbs of luggage. It took quite a while to get everything ticketed and tagged, so we were thankful for those that came along to help with moving the bags and watching the kids.

Speaking of the kids, they did really great throughout the process. As with her track record, Anna didn’t sleep a wink on the initial 15 hour flight, but then crashed on the second. Lucas slept the most, and Micah finally found a comfortable position to lay in when his body just couldn’t stay awake any longer. Eloise slept quite a bit on Mommy. On the flight, each person has his/her own entertainment center with games and movies, which helped keep the kids occupied. The kids each watched the “Minions” movie twice.

Just as had been planned, and after a brief layover in Shanghai, we arrived in Tianjin at 11:55pm on Tuesday. Our contact was waiting for us with two vans. The drive to our new home was about 30-40 mins. When we arrived, several people on the team here were gracious enough to help us at 1:30 in the morning to bring in all the bags to our new apartment. It was about 2am before we had everything in the apartment. All said and done, door to door, we spent about 29 hours traveling.