The longest day

Nobody slept much on the 14 hour flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong early Tuesday morning at 1:30 a.m.

It was a surreal experience to see most of the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra materialize out of the gloom of the International Terminal Monday night at San Francisco Airport. I was meeting up with the musicians for the long flight to Hong Kong on Singapore Airlines, then connecting to Dragonair for the final leg to Beijing, our destination.

At San Francisco, the musicians, who had started out in Cincinnati at around 6 p.m. earlier, looked relatively fresh. Between flights, they broke into their usual orchestra sections to hunt for food, drink and smoking lounges -- all violas, all brass players, all clarinets, the percussion section...

Onboard the 747 also (albeit mostly in Business Class) were Maestro Erich Kunzel, his wife Brunhilde, associate conductor John Morris Russell, tour soloist baritone Daniel Narducci, as well as symphony management.

The flight over the Pacific was choppy. Despite everyone's general good spirits, toward the end, signs of weariness showed on everyone's faces. The players all had different ways of coping with a travel day that would end up being 32 hours. Percussionist Dick Jensen confided that he had visited a chiropractor right before the flight. Violinist Eric Bates was listening to books on his iShock and clarinetist Jonathan Gunn was watching Tour de France DVDs on his PowerBook.

Violist Paul Frankenfeld was sipping Singapore Slings, a concoction invented at Raffles in Singapore, he informed me. It wasn't until principal violist Marna Street noted, at 11 a.m. Cincinnati time, that it was actually 11 p.m. Beijing time -- on Tuesday -- that we realized somewhere along the way, we had lost a day.

We landed in Hong Kong as dawn broke at 6 a.m. Wednesday, 24 hours into the journey. "The good news is, we get another breakfast on the next leg," Frankenfeld said.

Groan. They were definitely feeding us often, in regular intervals.

In Hong Kong, we all gravitated to the next gate en masse, and there it was, an Airbus A330 with a huge pink dragon painted down its entire side. We took off over mountainous terrain in the morning haze, not able to see much more than a blur of the spectacular Hong Kong skyline. I must come back to this place!

The plane landed on schedule in Beijing. We were bused to our very posh, year-old hotel on a huge street of massive skyscrapers, where a large red banner welcomed the orchestra -- and CCM violin prof Kurt Sassmannshaus, who has started a summer music festival near the Great Wall, made a surprise visit. (He was in town planning next year's festival.)

But we had less than 90 minutes before we were shuttled for an hour on another bus to a "press conference" and a welcome banquet, courtesy of the presenter, Zhang Wu, who is also on the 2008 Olympics committee. The press was there in full force, an obvious buildup to what Zhang says will be an "unforgettable concert" two days from now.

Next on my agenda: Sleep! And tomorrow, Pops musicians take a field trip to the Great Wall of China.