Robertson Tribe Updates

Jonathan made it to JFK airport Sunday where he boarded his plane bound for China, went out onto the runway, and promptly sat there, going no where. He found out that the United Nations had shut down the airport for the Iranian president (we are not going there ), and all flights were grounded. Once things cleared up, he thought they would be all set, but they were soon headed back to the gate. It seems that flight crews can only spend so much time on the plane, and with international flights, there is no wiggle room because of the length of the flights. The flight crew had to return to the terminal to disembark. Since there aren’t numerous international flights heading to Hong Kong each day, he was stuck. He ended up getting a hotel thanks to the airline and got 4 or 5 hours of sleep.

The next day, he was back at the airport trying to get on another flight to HKG, with a connection to China. He had a very, very important meeting in Ningbo, China (the biggest reason for this trip) and with the delay, he was barely going to make it and only if everything went well. They assured him he would make his connection in HKG, and Jonathan assured them he wouldn’t, having made the flight numerous times and being painfully aware of how long it really does take. Surprise, surprise, he missed his connecting flight to Ningbo, China and was unable to get to the meeting. The company in China ended up pushing the meeting to the next day to give him extra travel time. How important is he? I hope it doesn’t go to his head! The good news is that he did finally arrive in the correct city, attended his meeting and was extremely pleased with how things went.

The extended travel time has really taken its toll physically and he has been struggling with exhaustion. He falls asleep whenever he sits down which almost caused a problem. His first train ride in HKG found him sound asleep at his stop and he would have missed it completely had the train not made a dinging sound to notify passengers they were stopping and the doors were open.  On his return train ride, he called me, trying to stay awake until he got to his hotel for the night.

In fact, he was so tired during a later taxi ride that he forgot to get a receipt for his expense account (he rarely, if ever, forgets that, lol) and never felt his cell phone slip from his pocket and land in the seat. He was without a cellphone for a few days until he could purchase a replacement. That had been on the list of things to do while he was over there, but that got bumped to the top of the list in a hurry.

Now that his meeting is over, he is back in HKG, focusing on furnishing our apartment. Yes ladies, my husband is in HKG, picking out my furniture, appliances, etc. Can you feel my pain? He is armed with lists of what must be purchased before we arrive, what would be nice to have, what my preferences are etc and he’s a man on a mission. Not to mention he’s hooking up the utilities, getting cable (MUST HAVE INTERNET ACCESS) and all that other important stuff. Once he gets things wrapped up, he’ll be flying home for a week and half and then flying back to China for the big machine installation. He’ll be there until that’s completed, then he will fly back to the states, stay for another week or two, get us all ready and then we ALL fly to Hong Kong. He won’t be over jetlag until Christmas!

There Brenda, how’s THAT for an update?!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.