Day 1 – Newark to Shanghai (aka "The Longest Day)

After an early 6:30 am start we arrived in Newark at around 8:20 am, parked our car and headed to the airport for our 10:50 am flight to Shanghai. This trip is pretty routine for us as we fly quite a bit from Newark. The flight was going to be a long one. It is more than 7630 miles via the polar route and it takes 14 hours. This is roughly twice what it takes us to fly to Europe to put it in perspective. Take-off was on-time and the plane was only about two-thirds full and mostly Chinese.

Our Spacious Flight ("before picture")

At this point I want to give some props to credit cards. If you use them correctly, you can get some pretty amazing travel perks. One good one is that they upgraded us from Economy Class to Economy Premium Class for our flight. That moved us from more cramped seats way in the back of the plane to just three rows behind first class and a bit more spacious seats. Even better was I that was able to place us in a 3-seat group with an empty seat between us. 

I think that we got that upgrade because I have a United credit card but I’m really not sure. That same card also gave us two passes to the United lounge so we passed the time until we boarded in comfort. I’ll also confess that I used credit card points to book all our hotels stays (11 nights) and eight tours for free. It takes a bit of pre-planning but I think it’s worth it. Definitely makes the trip more affordable.

I have time on the flight so I’ll talk some more about the planning. As I said earlier, the National Day holiday has made it a little more difficult than I expected. In hindsight, I would have waited another week to go but it is what it is. I’ve already had two tours cancelled on October 2 and I just booked a food tasting tour in their place. Hopefully that will be okay. Otherwise we’ll just wander around Beijing on our own. Not a big deal. I also booked our last activity yesterday. I bought two advance tickets to Shanghai Disneyland for my birthday.

So was this the longest day? It was 36-hours long and we had about 24 hours of sunlight, but technically we crossed the International Date Line so I don't know. That might actually be our return flight.