The following post was written on the flight to Hong Kong then posted from our first hotel in Manila.
As I write this we are passing 36,000 feet over Tokyo Japan and it’s apparently 47 degrees below outside at this altitude. Makes Minnesota seem balmy. We’re 10 hours into our 14 hour flight to Hong Kong which will be followed by a brief 2 hour flight to Manila. We’ve had the opportunity to wave hello to our friends George & Deb as we passed Homer, Alaska as the cabin crew served us a delicious salmon lunch. We both agree that our flight on Cathay Pacific has been one of our most comfortable flights ever and have decided we’re going to have to fly through Hong Kong more often.
We started off our journey with a fabulous weekend in San Francisco with our wonderful hosts Caroline and Ben. Big thanks to both of them for working together to show us more of San Francisco than I would have thought I could see in 2 days while still giving us enough time to just relax and catch up with each other. We had hoped to meet up with our new friend Kiran but since neither of us have phones or ready access to email or any other means of communications we just couldn’t pull it off this time but we can’t wait to make it back for her wedding to Samih soon.
We enjoyed an assortment of delicious food including gigantic tostada salads from the Tiny Chihuahua, a home made pasta dinner, customized beer and cider tasting and possibly the most delicious mandarin oranges I’ve ever tasted. Of course it wouldn’t be an OlsonErnst trip without ice cream! The standout of that was clearly Smitten which freezes individual servings of ice cream right before your eyes with liquid nitrogen! Yes, that is exactly as awesome as it sounds! Caroline and Ben took some incredible “engagement photos” of us at sunset on the beach and we had an opportunity to dip our feet in the Eastern shore of the (icy cold) Pacific Ocean. We’ll be in touch soon after dipping our toes in the water on the Western shore.