China 2019 (1/10) – Taking Kids Home

We took a trip to Taiwan and China in June 2019. Like most of our trips, I began writing about it shortly after. However, I got distracted somehow and never gotten around to finish it. Over a year later, picking this project back up is providing me with a nice boost of vacation memories while home-bound under COVID.

A majority of a year has passed since our Asia trip last summer. This was the first major vacation that I didn’t immediately write about after returning home. The lazy side of me wanted to just let it go, but the fear of losing precious memories will perpetually haunt me. After all, brain cells and digital photographs could only retain so much. I’d better get on with the documentation while I still remember some of the details.

June 2019 concluded Xuan’s official first year at public school. To us, it meant the first of many years dealing with long summer vacations. There was a ton of anxiety in figuring out summer camp options, and frustration in paying summer flight prices. A new era of vacationing during the hot and expensive time of the year had thus begun.

Initially, we made plans to visit Taipei. There had been a level of shame in admitting that we were raising young world travelers who had never set foot in my own home town. Spending hot summer days in Taiwan is a collective memory among every ABC of our generation, and an experience Hong speaks fondly of. Our kids needed to get on with it. Plus, they hadn’t seen their grandparents in a while.

Of course, the first draft of the travel plan never would’ve stayed intact. Hey how about hopping to Chengdu 成都 from Taipei with the whole family? We had wished to visit that city but didn’t make it happen, and my parents were interested, too. It just happened that we had acquired a couple 7-day Marriot travel packages, which wouldn’t go very far in the US but could be exchanged for top-tier hotels in central China. I struggled for some time with summer flight prices and the inability to purchase both cities on the same itinerary. Later on, however, I discovered an ideal routing of SFO-TPE-CTU (with a layover in PEK)-SFO for a mere 70k United miles per person. Despite the lack of excitement in economy seats, this turned out to be the most valuable use of United miles I had ever come across.

The greedy travelers in us surfaced again after everything had been booked. Did we really want to stay in Chengdu for a full week? We weren’t used to staying in any city for more than four nights at a time and, meaning no disrespect, Chengdu didn’t seem more interesting than Xian, Singapore, or London. After staring at the map for a bit, an idea emerged to take a side trip to the nearby city of Chongqing 重慶. We’d keep our rooms in Chengdu as a base (since the Marriot travel package couldn’t be split up into partial weeks) and venture out for a couple days via China’s famous high speed rail. My dad had a panic attack from our plan to waste two nights at a 5-star hotel, but we still managed to convince him to come along.

So there, a simple “let’s visit grandma” trip turned into a 4-flights-2-trains-4-hotels-3-cities madness. Just the way we liked it.

After a lazy brunch on Saturday, we headed to SFO for our EVA flight to Taiwan. We used to dread long flights with kids because of how inconsiderate little people can be when confined to an uncomfortable seat. It’s amazing, though, how quickly they matured over the past few years. Our 6-year-old and 4-year-old now breezed through airport security, chilled at a lounge, and boarded the flight more smoothly than many adults out there.