JOURNEY BEGINS...

Okay, I woke up extremely spazzed.

Excited over the prospect of seeing the world's most wonderful couple, catching a concert in the UK, and to enjoy travelling with my best friend from the 3rd grade. Dropped off Miki and gave her a big bear hug at school.

• I paced around the house and triple checked everything.

• Come 4PM...anxiety began to set in. Haven't heard from Ching since noon. She rang me up to inform me that credit card companies need advance notice of travel or else the card would be deemed useless. She was supposed to arrive around 5PM...but um, no deal.

• Come 5PM...I've run in and out of my bathroom and trying to surf the web. Quintuple checked my stuff.

• Come 6PM...I ring up the car service to let them know the 6:30PM pickup will be delayed.

• 6:18PM...Ching calls and tells me she's on Market Street and heading towards my way.

I stop chugging air and begin to round everything about. It turns out that Ching's 3PM (early) bus had registration problems and was PULLED from the route. She had to wait for the next bus in the middle of nowhere and managed to get here on time - as opposed to ahead of time. OY.

[It all STARTED here...]

We breathed a sign of relief when we made it to JFK and excitedly hopped on the Virgin Atlantic. As boarded the plane, we noticed that the seat assignments were duplicated since the ticketing agent hand-written our new seat numbers on the old boarding passes. Good ol' Chingie swapped our seats with a family of 4, so they could be seated together...AWWWW! On that note, we started to josh around about sitting on each other's lap and taking turns.

This elderly British gentleman turned around, red in the face, and flashed us a nasty glare.

Of course, most men would have wild fantasies of two Asian women on top of each other. Ah poo. No sense of humor. Shall we have crumpets and tea while we are seated on top of each other?

Anyway, the plane took off late and I was strategically placed next to a couple with an adorable little baby boy. He had the bluest eyes and the sweetest smile. Fortunately for us, he was so well behaved and slept through the entire flight. Initially, the little one was trying to grab a handful of my hair 'cuz his parents didn't bring any toys on board. Plus, he was trying to get my attention so I could play with him.

We were seated at the bulkhead with plenty of leg room. The *ONLY* existential benefit of being vertically challenged is not having to worry about being cramped in those awful and uncomfortable seats. For entertainment, our video screens were mounted on those thingamabobs where it was tucked under the seat and manually raised to eye level. Virgin had so much entertainment programming, ranging from Hong Kong Chinese variety shows to blockbuster movies like, "Sideways". I'm definitely flying them again!

Unfortunately for the tall couple seated beside me, the baby carrier (mounted against the wall) made it difficult for them to completely raise or lower those video thingamabobs. They had to crawl underneath the screen and the baby carrier or climb over their seats to go to the john. My seat was jammed and I couldn't lower the back, so I resorted to sleeping hunched over on my flippy table. I think I only managed about 2 hours of sleep on my 6-7 hour flight. It was apparent that I was too excited to sleep.