This Great Work

Per our contract for living in China, our unmarried children get a free flight to come and visit us.  Chandler is the only one who qualifies for that, but for quite some time, getting a visa to visit wasn't even a possibility.  And when it did become a possibility, it was very expensive and required a 4 day stay in Washington DC or paying a whole lot of money for someone to go into the embassy to do that process for us.  It was not really in consideration.  But when Cache offered to do it for us while he was in DC for Thanksgiving, we decided to go to all of the effort to make it happen.  We decided to keep it a secret from the girls so it would be an amazing Christmas surprise. We did mostly well on the surprise.  Greta did hear me talking to Cache about the visa process one day back in November, but didn't think too much about it or ask further questions so we hoped that she hadn't really heard as I supposed.  I also had up the map of the Seattle air...

 China was difficult the first time around to get into---miraculous to have actually made it. The second time, it was easier, but while going through it, it didn't feel like it--we still needed approval to enter the country.  And again, it was nonetheless miraculous. This time around, we could fly directly from Salt Lake City without a week in a city approved for testing. And only two negative Covid tests were needed.  Seemed simple enough. Then we read the fine-print requirements:  2 RT-PCR tests at CILA certified labs with two different reagents 24 hours apart from each other one and two days before the flight.  Who in the US is still doing PCR test with a rapid turn around?  And who knows the reagents they use? No one that we could find. After several phone calls, we were exhausted at the thought of actually being successful.  We finally just decided to use two different certified labs and hope that their reagents were different and that we could g...