A Bizarre Trip

Just sit right back and hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this tropic port, aboard this tiny ship...

We left Japan Monday, February 21st. Leaving Japan we had no major problems. I think there was a small ticket glitch in Komatsu, but other than that, smooth sailing.

When we landed in Chicago, I talked to my mom and she told me that our flight, which was originally scheduled for 7:35 pm, was delayed until 4:00am the next morning. I immediately went to the flight's board and saw that our flight was on time. I breathed a sigh of relief and we took a nap in a small area in the airport.

Ayu got up to go to the bathroom, came back and woke me up. She told me that our flight was now at 10:30pm. I checked it myself, was a bit disappointed but went back to my nap. A short while later, Ayu went for a walk, came back and told me our flight was canceled. I checked the board and in disbelief we both went to the customer service counter.

After waiting for about an hour a half, we finally got to talk to a person who works for United. While we were waiting, my mom managed to get us tickets out of Chicago early the next morning. The person at the counter said "I don't know why they did that..." and I expected to hear the flight was full. She then said that we could leave that night on a 9:05 flight. Happy, we left to get some dinner and relaxed at our gate, F7.

We got bumped around gates quite a bit - but more about that in a second. At our various gates we heard announcements like this:

"Flight blah blah blah to bleh bleh bleh, your flight is ready to go, we are just waiting to get a plane and a flight crew."

"Flight blah blah blah to Cleveland, we were flying in a flight crew to get you guys out of here but we sent them to the wrong city."

"Gates F4a and F4b will depart shortly. First will be F4a to blah blah. Next we will board F4b to Burlington. F4a, we are just waiting to get you a plane."

"Attention passengers, purple midgets from Mars are invading the world to steal our spaghetti."

Just kidding. It would have probably fit in with the night though.

Now, here's the fun part:

Our flight was delayed until 10:10pm. Then our gate was moved to F9. Then we were delayed again. Then our gate was moved to F14, F11, F12, F13, F4, and finally back to F11. During this nice heaping of gate changes we had additional sprinklings of delays. We didn't leave Chicago until 12:40am local time - almost 12 hours after arriving.

While we were waiting, we found out that another flight to Burlington boarded at around 1:30pm (earlier in the day, obviously), had the gate shut and then the plane sat there until 6:00pm. Apparently, everyone got in the plane and couldn't go anywhere because they realized they might need a flight crew...

We arrived in Burlington at 4:00am.

Our trip in Vermont was rather uneventful and relaxing until the last few days. As posted earlier, Burlington had 25.1" of snow. It was an awesome storm and was a blast to play in once the bad weather subsided.

We left Vermont on Thursday, March 10th at 8:00am. The flight to Chicago was rather smooth and uneventful. When we got to Chicago we had some Johnny Rocket burgers and boarded the plane.

Where we sat.

And sat.

And sat.

We waited about 90 minutes for 26 people whose flights into Chicago were running late.

Once these people arrived, we finally started taxiing down the runway. As we approached take off, the plane just stopped.

And we sat.

And sat.

And sat. (See a pattern here?)

After 20 minutes of waiting, the pilot came on the intercom system and informed us that there was a small, non-safety issue with our air conditioning system. We had to taxi back to the gate, wait for maintenance to inspect/fix it and then we could leave. This fiasco took another hour.

Finally, we were airborne.

Our flight to Japan was smooth with no major turbulence, which is always a nice thing. Then about 7 hours into the flight I noticed something weird happened. Since I can't sleep on planes I usually keep myself busy with trivial things. I was watching a show about an Alaskan ice sculpting contest when I noticed the plane made a sharp bank to the starboard side. I thought this was odd but kept watching the show.

5 minutes later, the captain came on the intercom saying that Tokyo had experienced a significant earthquake and we were being redirected for an emergency landing in Alaska. This was beyond freaky because for well over a year now I have been having re-occurring dreams about flying to America and having to make an emergency landing in Alaska. The last time I had this dream was probably 2 months ago.

We landed in Alaska at about 1am local time, got to our hotel at around 4:30am and slept for a few hours. As you can see from another earlier posting, we had a chance to do quite a bit of exploring/shopping for just one day. I also had some phenomenal local beers. We were only there for a day, but it was a great experience. It was especially nice to get out and do something besides watch how horrible the situation in Japan was turning out to be. Ayu was worried about her sister in Tokyo and we tried desperately to contact her to no avail. (Her sister was in Ishikawa during the earthquake, so she is safe, by the way).

We left the hotel at 3:40am the next morning to wait around until almost 10:00am to depart. The flight from Alaska to Tokyo only took about 6.5 hours and it went rather smoothly. I had a chance to talk to a flight attendant about the emergency landing and he said he has been a flight attendant for a long time and he never heard of any such situation like this, which adds to the freaky-ness of my dreams.

Once we landed in Narita, United paid for our bus over to Haneda, got us on a plane there and we finally arrived home at 6:30pm, Sunday, March 13th.

Although United really dropped the ball on our way to Vermont (a plane sitting at the gate for 4 hours due to a lack of flight crew?!), they more than made up for it with the return leg of the trip. They put us up in the Hilton Hotel, paid for our breakfast there ($40 at the Hilton), automatically put us on a flight out of Haneda, paid our $60 bus tickets to get there and gave us each 7,000 bonus miles.

I woke up this morning not sure if I was still in Alaska, or if I was back in Vermont, or if I was really home in Japan. Now I have to convince myself that somehow it really is Monday, somehow this trip really did happen and somehow things will be OK for the people on the other side of Japan.