Hello everyone, we made it here to Hangzhou, China where we will pick up our son Monday Morning! It's 4 am here and I can't sleep. A nice young man let me into the business center at the hotel a whole 3 hours before it opens. The trip over went very well. The girls did so good and were so patient. 18 hours in the air is a bit much at one time. We almost wished we had had a little layover on one of our stops, but we had to keep moving! My wife and Karen joked about me being the "Airport Nazi", but we barely made each flight and ity was really tight. We sat right next to a nice young couple from Memphis, TN. on our long flight from Detroit to Tokyo, who were headed to Beijing to adopt their little girl. they were so nice and we exchanged many stories. We are hoping to meet up with them on the last leg of our trip next week in Guangzhou to see them and meet their little girl. We spent the night in Guangzhou (by the airport) Friday night and then then flew to Hangzhou yesterday morning. We will tell you later about our funny Chinese breakfast at the hotel in Guangzhou. We had a serious language barrier thing going and we ate some interesting things. One thing I have learned from a fair amount of travel is that eggs are always the same wherever you go and you can count on them.
When we arrived in Hangzhou yesterday, our coordinator was not there to meet us. We did not panic and kept our cool and found someone to interpret for us and get us into two taxis to take us to our hotel. It turns out that over here they don't use AM and PM. But when people do use it, they interpret PM to be after midnight. So, she was set to pick us up after midnight instead of 12:30 in the afternoon. It all worked out fine and we are here now and loving it. We met with her yesterday afternoon and she is a very nice young lady. She apologized for the mix up and felt bad, but we had moved on and told her everything worked out fine. We went over our plan for the week and we will pick up Maximus tommorow morning which is Monday morning. We are 11 hours ahead of you in the US. We are staying in a very nice hotel, right by West Lake, where they have alot of walking trails and parks. Last night all of the travel and jet lag caught up with the girls and they crashed and burned at about 6 pm. We walked about 10 minutes to a McDonalds and got a quick bite and came back. It was about 7pm and we all crashed out!
We have met so many nice Chinese people already in our travels and already here at the hotel. We are all very excited and the week promises to deliver much adventure. I will try and post some pictures tomorrow. Thank you for checking in with us. We would appreciate your prayers and any comments you might want to leave us. We know from past experience, it is so awesome to communicate with loved ones back home.

Talk to you soon.
Love
The Joes