Home Sweet Home (away from home)

We'll be staying at the White Swan (the adoptive parents' mecca) for 14 days of our 18 day stay in China.
We're SO GLAD that we get to stay in the same place the entire time. It makes it so much more comfortable and easy on us.
The drawback is that we won't get to experience another city/province, but I think by the end of our 18 day stay, we'll feel that we've seen enough!!
We haven't gotten anymore concrete travel info. or itinerary yet, but we did find out we need to BE in Beijing on 8/5, so we'll be leaving from Chicago on 8/4.
I think (hope!) we'll get on a direct flight from O'Hare to Beijing, which is scheduled as a 13 hr. 20 min. flight. argh. Leave Chicago at 12:40 pm, arrive in Beijing at 3:00pm next day.
Our other option was to fly Chicago to Minneapolis to Tokyo (55 min. layover---yikes!) to Beijing. The total travel time was over 16-17 hrs. I think. Add to that ALL those wonderful opportunities to lose baggage!
We also need to add an extra day to the end of our stay in order to get out of Guangzhou.
Our agency offered us the following 4 options: risky, cumbersome, more expensive and just plain crappy.
We decided to go with "cumbersome". Don't ask me why......it really wasn't a fun decision.
So, we'll be staying one day and night in Hong Kong. Kind of exciting. We'll have a whole day to explore. When are we ever going to get to Hong Kong again?
I'll post our itinerary when we get it.
SEVENTEEN MORE DAYS TILL WE LEAVE FOR CHINA!!!!!!!!!!!!!