I took the train to Sheung Shui and then a bus to the airport. There's a photo from the bus ride attached. How do you like the universal symbol for Disney?

I got to the airport uneventfully, then the fun began . First, I found out that the Continental Micronesia counter didn't open until two hours before boarding. And I couldn't get through security to the airline lounge without a boarding pass. And I couldn't get a boarding pass until the counter opened. You see the dilemma.

Then I got clever. After some asking, I found out I could access the internet and a printer at the business center (or centre, as it's spelled here) of the hotel attached to the airport. I walked over there, checked in on the Continental web site, printed my boarding passes, and for 50 Hong Kong dollars (about $6.50 US), I was golden.

Or so I thought. As it turns out, security in Hong Kong doesn't honor internet boarding passes. After all that, I still couldn't get to the lounge where comfortable chairs, free internet, and snacks awaited me. But at least it killed some of the copious time I had before my flight.

On asking some more, I found out that I could have gone to one of the airline ticket offices in the Airport Express stations in Hong Kong to get my boarding pass. The whole "I'll save some time and take the most direct route to the airport" really didn't do much for me. I wouldn't have known to get the boarding passes in Hong Kong anyway, and the transfers to get from the KCR to the Airport Express would have been annoying. I definitely didn't want to spend the time and money to schlep back into Hong Kong just so I could get the boarding passes. If I had known all of this, I would have spent more time in Shenzhen today.

So I got a nice steak dinner at one of the better restaurants on the Hong Kong side of the security gates and sat around reading, doing puzzles, and watching people until the counter opened.