Day 2, Year 5:  LAX to Hong Kong to Penang, Malaysia
Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Weather: Southeast Asia Warm and Rainy
Location: Hotel Malaysia, Penang

We started our Tuesday with a midnight toast in an airport bar in Los Angeles International Airport. It certainly wasn’t a romantic setting, but it was the best we could come up with in the airport terminal. We were sitting on bar stools overlooking renovations to the food court area, both of us with our computers going. I think you get the picture. We then boarded our Cathay Pacific plane at 1:00 am LA time, 4:00 am East Coast time. At that point we had already been up for over twenty hours. We were served dinner just after take off and then tried to sleep. The Cathay seats are much more comfortable than most US airlines, but still we only slept for five hours. We still had eight hours to go, so we filled the time watching movie after movie. We arrived in Hong Kong at 7:00 am and spent the next eight hours working on our computers, reading, eating, and walking. We left Hong Kong at 3:00 pm and at 6:40 pm we arrived in Penang, took a taxi for the 18 kilometer ride into Georgetown, and checked into the Malaysia Hotel. We are exhausted, so we are going to forgo the sushi dinner we had planned. We have to be at the ferry terminal by 7:30 am to catch the ferry to Langkawi, so sleep seems much more important than eating at this point. And besides, we were served dinner our flight from Hong Kong and aren’t hungry anyway. We are just happy to be here and grateful that we had no problems with any of our flights. And miraculously, all our luggage arrived. We had a return ticket on Cathay Pacific from Los Angeles, but purchased Delta flights from Myrtle Beach to LA separately. But Delta checked all four 50+ pound bags straight through to Penang and they made it and we didn’t have to pay anything, so for that we are grateful. Now we are just anxious to get back to Windbird to see how she fared in our absence.

From 091027 Day 1 LAX–Anniversary Toast