Day 1 – The flight West...kinda

My butt’s sore and I still have 5 hours left to Hong Kong. Day 1 started at 5 am this morning, at the airport by 7:20am for our 9:35am flight. First thing we noticed is that there’s not a lot of people in the check-in line. We are on an upgraded 777-300ER which for the Business Class people (the Bishop) means they have the pod seating and for the rest of us we have, believe it or not fairly comfortable seats with our own entertainment center. The best part because they’re not full….I would think the flight is maybe 40% full, pretty much everyone in economy has a section of 3 seats to themselves I’m in a window seat - 61K, right near the back.
We took off on time and the coolest thing on this plane is they have a camera that on the belly of the plane…must be under the wings…so you can see forward.

I could watch us takeoff and the nose gear going up…which for me was pretty cool. The flight plan takes us up over Bracebridge, over Hudson Bay, past Churchill, Alert and apparently 135 miles south of the North Pole, across the Arctic Ocean (which had ice chunks on it..I took pictures and then across Siberia and down towards Hong Kong. Right now (8pm Wednesday, which is already mid morning on Thursday) we’re flying past Irkuts….I think I’ve seen that on the Risk board.

The most annoying thing for me, a guy that likes to look out the window, is that they made us all shut the blinds, then they turn off the lights. People hate it when I open the blind to see outside…..So far I’ve read the inflight magazines, watched 2 movies…The book of Eli and Up in the Air…I’ve read some of my book, read some of my stuff for the youth seminars, ate 2 meals and now playing on my computer.

We made it to Hong Kong about 1:30pm Thursday…which for you in the eastern time zone is 1:30am Thursday. It’s pretty cloudy so you can’t see much of the place. We looked around the airport a little until we found the Cathay Pacific Lounge where we got fresh Wonton soup and I connected to the internet to send and receive a couple of emails. We headed to our gate for our flight to Bangkok and the clerk there told us that the plane was only 20% full. So I was in the same seat at the back of the plane and there were only 5 only people in the section. So a plane that can hold 301 people, had maybe 50 people on it. It was only 2 hours long.

Now we’re in the lounge in Bangkok and waiting until our 10:55pm flight to Colombo, Sri Lanka. We have about a 5 hour wait. Might be time to get some shut eye. I think the rest of the trip should go onto Day 2 considering that I’m technically into it.