IAH Departure - 12:50pm, MXP Arrival - 10:35am with an easy change over in Newark and another quick stop in Zurich... well...that's how it was supposed to go! Things started off great, I built an extra hour in our deadline for leaving the house, knowing we'd need some of it. Only left 15 minutes late to find the airport fairly empty; so we were sitting at the departure gate an hour early. But the takeoff was delayed 20 mins on the tarmac and we flew aroun...

...and still packing. This luggage we bought last year was a mistake, the bags can easily hold 70 pounds! 50 pounds hardly fills them up 3/4 of the way and all our stuff slides around...thinking of stuffing mine with blown up zip lock bags. Heather on the other hand keeps making trips from the closet and dropping stuff in both my bag and hers; she's been packing for 2 weeks already, how is there anything still left in her closet??

Check-in at IAH was mostly uneventful, but of course we got the "hook-up" in the check-in line, which only meant that despite the coordinator's best intentions we ended up in the slowest line...and then of course our bags were overweight because of our last minute decision to buy new luggage 3 hours before we left! Overall Air China gets a solid B for their maiden voyage, check-in was slow, takeoff was 30 minutes delayed, and they didn't control the board...