Direct Route

P1000432, originally uploaded by yellojkt.

United Airlines has a daily direct flight from Dulles Airport to Beijing. The flight is 13 hours long. The flight was completely full.

The plane leaves at 12:30 every day. We stayed at a nearby hotel that lets you park your car there for free and took their shuttle to the airport. Dulles uses a weird shuttle tram system that involves huge rolling machines that look like the vehicles out of Damnation Alley.

The plane itself was an old 747 that was showing its age. Business class looked really swank with barcaloungers and personal DVD players, but we were back in steerage. The movies were awful and the screen was hard to see. I got up to stretch frequently and got a lot of reading in.