Brought to You From Narita, Japan

Last night was one of those stressful sleepless nights. Having dinner too late in the evening, I had acid reflux when I went to bed. It kept me up until 1am when I last looked at the phone. The alarm was set for 4:50, our taxi was coming at 6am. Just as I fell asleep, I heard that distinctive beep signaling that my phone is almost out of juice. 

With my phone also being our alarm clock, we were dependent on it to ring at the right time and not die out during the night. With Ron sleeping, I had to root around looking for the charger PLUS the electric adapter. Our adapter is a bit boxy, so the weight of it sometimes pulls it out of the wall socket. I had to create a blind balancing act to keep the charger happily connected to the wall, while the phone was happily suckling on the charger. All appropriate lights were lit, so I could get back to sleep. 

An hour into a deep sleep, my subconscious shoved me awake. Check the clock. All is well at 2:45am. Falling back asleep, again that feeling thrusts me into having to think. Look at the clock 3:34 am. Try it again, thinking 3 is the charm, but not so. The third awakening was at 4:45am. Why bother trying to get a few minutes sleep now. Just out of curiosity and lack on energy, I did maintain an inert status long enough to see if the alarm would go off. It sure did. Now that I had this extra time, I could pack the charger, the electric adapter, and the phone. 

When we checked in for our flight, there was still some anxiety over the luggage, though I had given away the third piece yesterday.  No worries, both bags came in under the maximum allowed, though my backpack is stuffed. They would only check it to Japan. We have a twenty-one hour layover, so we will need to collect it and put it through again when we check in again. They could not give us boarding passes through.

Air New Zealand did a nice job with the service from Auckland to Tokyo, but damn if the weather was not cooperating. Almost immediately they gave us immigration papers to fill in for Japan as well as Customs Declarations. With the plane shaking like paint in a mixer, I thought it is a waste of time to fill out those papers until we are sure we will survive the flight. If anything, we needed to amend our wills. 

Yet, we landed fine. We could have taken the shuttle to our hotel if we wanted to wait 1 1/2 hours, so it was a taxi instead.  Don't even get me started on the cost of the taxi. However, the airline gave us breakfast and dinner, so we did not need to venture out for dinner; that was a savings. 

Japan is 4 hours different than NZ, meaning we gained 4 hours. Too bad, because by 8pm, Ron was ready for bed. I have to stay up later or I will be up at 3am. I should take a pill, but they are packed and I am not touching those bags. 

Tomorrow, we will be home again. After a week or two, it will be like we had not had a vacation at all. The photos will have to become our computer slideshow screensaver to refresh our memory of the fantastic times we had, the places we visited, and the people we met.

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What Now My Love?

What Now My Love? Now that it's over...Snowy, cold Budapest, that is what is next.

So today is our last day of vacation. Tomorrow morning, we fly from here to Christ Church, Christ Church to Tokyo. There we have a twenty-one hour stop-over, where the plan is to leave staying overnight in a hotel and returning the airport to continue the journey. We will then fly from Tokyo to Munich followed by Munich to Budapest. We arrive in Budapest at 10:30pm. I have to be at school the following morning at 9am for State exams. In some ways, I am happy to be going home. I need to be assured where the bathroom is during the middle of the night. When you move around as often as we have, in nighttime sleepy coma, it seems like someone is pulling bad trick by moving the bathroom around the building.
 

We won’t have much to report today. We are getting laundry done, hoping clean laundry packs easier that dirty to fit it all into our allocated two suitcases. That third suitcase is still sitting in our room. It is like an unwanted animal that is left along the roadside that keeps finding its way back home. Well, if I am honest, I have yet been able to set it free into the wild with hopes that someone will adopt it, giving it a good home.
 

Unfortunately, this hostel does not use the Internet service that I have credit with. All of the YHAs use Global Gossip, but this is not a YHA hostel. To find locations where I may be able to use it, I went into an electronics store to ask. Better yet, they have just received the iPad, so they were available to try out. I had an opportunity to try the iPad, do a web search and found that the hostel two doors down from our hostel uses Global Gossip. I am going to try to see if they will let me use their lobby for an hour.

Chances are nothing special is going to happen today, but if it does, it will appear here later as a separate posting. This trip, we have traveled on jets, planes, cars, shuttles, vans, trucks, ferries, and trains. We missed bicycles, horses, skateboards, and helicopters. Always leave wanting.
 

Now, before I sign off from Auckland, I would like everyone to get up and give Ron a standing ovation for his perfect planning on this trip. Every time someone asked me anything about it, I had to defer to him. He did it all, researched it all over months, made all of the reservations, in essence he did the entire thing without much input from me. I make the last comment only on a positive note. Usually, I am overwhelmed with school; Ron will run things by me, but I generally nod my head, say “whatever you think” since he had researched the ins and outs, so in reality the entire trip is a surprise. He did a superlative job, though I admit I did have my doubts when I learned how many bus rides we would be taking, how many cities we would be at, how many one night stands were involved, but it all turned out excellently. Kudos, Ron and thank you for another fantastic vacation adventure.    

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What Day Is It? Where Am I? What International Dateline?

Arriving in Tokyo, we had a 6 ½ hours lay-over before the next flight. They immediately sent us from one terminal to the other where our flight was to leave from. God knows why when there were 6 ½ hours to waste; I did not see why there was a rush. We thought we would check out the Diners Club lounge, but it was outside of the secured area. We would have to go through Customs and Passport Control to reach it. That let that option out. Being a major airport, there was not a lot to do. There were no coffee shops, only two restaurants that happened to serve coffee and a half dozen or so shops, most were duty free. Finding vacant rows of chairs, we joined the others who sprawled across multiple seats and napped.

When it was finally time to board, they told us they needed to change our boarding passes. We thought we had hit the lottery again with an upgrade, but no such luck. Still in economy, the seats were cramped. This leg was an Air New Zealand flight. Again the service was excellent, but the seating tight making a 10 hour forty-five minute flight seem like it was much longer. This was not the end of our travels yet. Once landing in Christ Church, we had an hour to get out and wait before taking off again for Auckland.

Reaching Auckland would have been a wonderful experience had our luggage arrived, but it was nowhere to be found. We had to put in a claim with hopes it will show up tomorrow. I am wondering how many of those who went as far as Tokyo with us had to file claims. There were others on our Tokyo to Auckland flight also filing claims.

Here is a recap of the trip so far. Budapest to Munich – 2 hour flight, rush on to the next plane. Munich to Tokyo – 11 hour flight, upgraded to business class. Tokyo 6 ½ hours wait time for the next flight. Tokyo to Christ Church 10 hours 50 minutes. Wait time in Christ Church 1 hour, Reboard. Christ Church to Auckland 1 hour 50 minutes. One nice thing about Air New Zealand is that the plane had individual monitors, which you could start before the plane ever leaves the ground and continues until you reach the destination gate. Regardless, tired are we servants to traipsing the world in search of beauty, history, or nature.

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Munich - Like Munch's The Scream

With surprising efficiency, there were four Lufthansa employees waiting for our arrival. Each held a destination sign: Tokyo, San Francisco, Chicago, Newark. Once they collected their respective group, they escorted us directly to passport control. My intuition was correct about the Asians on our flight. The passport officers must have been called in especially for this, since only the people from our flight filled the two lines. The controllers were slow, browsing through everyone’s passport.

Our escort kept trying to move people from one line to another depending on the current speed of any given line at the moment. When she pulled three Japanese women to the other line, she had second thoughts and put them back in our line. They were originally right in front of us, so I let them back in their place.  It was those ahead of us who complained and tried verbally forcing them to the back of the line. Of course, they were Americans. I had overheard their conversation earlier. They were loud and verbal. When the women were about to move to the end of the line, I spoke up and told them to stay where they were, verbally sparring with the loudmouths. Their flight to San Francisco was scheduled for ten minutes later than ours was after all. Our needs were more urgent. On the other side of passport control, our escort reappeared rushing us all to the appropriate gate. The plane was boarded already, so only those of us later arrivals were the hold-up.

Just as I handed the woman my boarding pass, she said “We would like to offer you a seat in business class today.” Rather than say thank you and turning to tell Ron that I hoped he enjoyed his flight too and I would see him in Tokyo, the words slipped from my mouth “We are traveling together.” She responded with “Let’s see what we can do. Ah, here is one for both of you.”

Business class seat! Score one for us. The only time I had ever been upgraded was a flight from Houston to Dallas, barely enough time to enjoy the advantages. Ironically, the last time we flew through Tokyo, Ron had a kidney stone attack on the plane. They upgraded him only then. They would not even let me up to check on him. This being an eleven hour flight, we took were thrilled to take advantage of the services. When the meal service started, they put cloth placemats on our trays. The dinner service is 3 courses, each served individually after you select from a menu. The seats move electronically in all phases of sitting up to flat as a bed. There is so much room; there is no concern about your fellow travelers space being invaded. The service was excellent. We are now spoiled for future flights.

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Kiwi Adventures Begin Here

Checking with the Lufthansa website, our flight was going to be forty minutes late. There was no sense in sitting at the airport longer than needed, so we called the shuttle service to ask if we could delay our pick-up. They gave us an additional thirty minute grace period to sit around and wait at home. Now that we had the extra unplanned time, we weren’t sure what to do with it. Now, I have to brag. We are leaving for 33 days and our luggage consists of one carry-on suitcase each, and one backpack each. My backpack holds my netbook computer, my camera, the extra telephoto lens, my phone, and all of the cords needed to maintain the electric and charge the batteries of the above. 

When they came for us, there was only a single rider in the van. Yet, it took them over an hour to get us to the airport. The last pick-up was on the border of Slovakia or so it seemed. We drove forever.  Once we arrived, we then had to wait twenty minutes for her to get to the van; this made me reconsider our decision to take this later shuttle. Once full, our first stop was Ferihegy I to drop off two people. We were no sooner on the road again, when suddenly the driver turned around and returned back to Ferhegy I to pick up another passenger. My stomach knots were telling my headache, this is punishment for changing the shuttle times.

Once at the airport, all thoughts of tons of time for hanging around flew out faster than any jet or the line we were in. The airport was so crowded, it looked like the entire city was evacuating. We were able to get our boarding passes from the self-check in machines for Budapest to Munich and Munich to Tokyo, but not beyond. Lufthansa only had three desks open: one only for 1st and Business class. Even when she was not busy, she refused to take any other travelers. With the flight delayed by forty minutes, it was still a dubious situation whether we were going to make it or not. Both Lufthansa and Air New Zealand have strict policies on carry-on luggage. We could take on the carry-on suitcase or the backpacks, but not both. Needless to say, the carry-ons were checked. As luck would have it it turned out we did with a bit of time to spare. The Duna Lounge has just been added to the Diners Club list of lounges, but we have been rejected in lounges in the past since our, cards are American Diners Club, not international ones. We tested the waters and received warm welcomes and free drinks with snacks.

Almost everyone on the plane had reason for concern since we left Budapest late. Still we were lucky. The flights to London, Paris and Frankfurt were all completely cancelled; at least we made it out. About 1/3 of us were going on to Tokyo and another 1/3 was headed to San Francisco. It did not seem to be many stopping in Munich. Both groups were fearful of missing our connections. There was no time to spare. We waited longer on the runway than usual once we landed, only to have our gate changed when we arrived. They had to bus us to the terminal; our late arrival caused our plane to lose its gate. I mentioned to Ron that the bus was filled with Asians, so perhaps they were going to Tokyo also, which may make Lufthansa hold the plane.

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