Visa is NOT everywhere I want to be

We ended our cruise in Yichang (we didn't really know where it was either) and said goodbye to our Australian friends. We had arranged a transfer from the boat to the bus station in town and we had a vague idea to bus and train our way to Shanghai. In other words, our planning in China (really just Megan's planning in China as I didn't participate so much) didn't go past this point.

Sometime on the cruise we realized that the bus/train option to Shanghai would pretty much take an entire day and involve multiple train tickets and transfers. We realized on the boat that maybe this isn't the best idea we've ever had, but it's pretty hard to buy a plane ticket from a boat in the middle of China. Our only option was to ask the person who was coming for our transfer if it would be possible to buy a plane ticket for later that afternoon.

Betty, our lovely transfer guide, immediately managed to secure us tickets for less than $200 a pop and we were estatic. All we had to do was go to the travel agents to pay for and pick up the tickets. We assumed the difficult part was done, but we were wrong.

The travel agent didn't accept our credit card and we didn't have enough cash. We thought that wasn't a problem we would just go to the ATM. So Betty and the driver take us to the bank only it doesn't take our ATM card. Neither does the 2nd or 3rd bank that we cross town to find. It's not like I'm traveling with an f--- Bank of Redneck VA card, it's a VISA! (Also, after odd instructions from Betty to add numbers to my ATM card my bank turned it off and I was without it for the next 6 days but I would find that out later.)

I give up on the ATM and try to tap into my travelers checks. Bank #3 won't take them and sends us back to Bank #1. So after about an hour of our Bank Tour of Yichang we managed to get enough local currency to actually purchase our plane tickets. Then I slept the entire flight to Shanghai.