Flight to a New Land

I left Cedar Rapids, Iowa approximately 7:00am Saturday morning on a short 39 minute flight to Chicago, Illinois.  We waited at the airport in Chicago for about 4 hours until our next long flight to Beijing, China.  Before taking this trip we all had to have a passport, which is a kind of identification which allows someone to travel to other countries.  Therefore, before getting on the airplane they had to check our passports.  The airplane from Chicago to Beijing was a very large one.  It had over 50 rows with as many as 9 seats in each row. 
Our speed at take off was over 200 miles per hour. Before our flight to Beijing began, I was curious if we would be flying east over the Atlantic Ocean or west over the Pacific Ocean, but we actually headed straight north towards the Artic Ocean.  We flew over Canada, the Hudson Bay and the Queen Elizabeth Islands.  Our flight speed while we were in the air was at times 530 miles per hour.  About 6 hours into the flight, we passed over the North Pole!! I tried to look out the window to see if Santa was hanging around, but we were over 35,000 feet in the air.  How many miles is that?  So no sign of the jolly old fella, I suppose he was inside staying warm because the temperature outside the airplane was -92 degrees. That is pretty cold! While we were in the air, I watched the sun set and then about an hours later it rose again.  It was pretty strange.  The whole flight from the United States to China took about 14 hours and when we arrived in Beijing it was 4:25pm on Sunday.