Anita and I were planning on staying up all Monday night and going to the Tokyo Fish Market at 5 am on Tuesday, but around 3am we crashed. Anita got up at 4:30 and fully intended to get me up, but she saw that a sub-tropical-storm was headed at Tokyo and that it was already raining pretty hard… There’s something about being dog tired and lost in a city that is much worse sounding if you add in the attribute – rain soaked. So we slept in till 8 am (I didn’t mind too much).
We got up, found food, repacked, and head out for the subway entrance. We said our goodbyes to April at the subway station (taking different trains) and we took off for the Tokyo station. We then hopped on the Narita express train for the airport. We had a brief scare when we realized (once on the train) that it was all reserved seating, but it was ok, we were allowed to stand… After an hour on the train, we went to the airport, went through check-in, got mediocre airport food, had to go through customs, and made it right on time for our plane to board.
The flight back was much better than the flight there. 11 hours goes by a lot faster when you watch a decent movie, read for a couple of hours, and sleep the rest of the time (praise sleep). We then had to go through immigration in the US and customs (getting our check-on bags, walking around, waiting in line, getting a stamp or something, and then turning in our check-in bags again), and going to the plane. We would have missed the flight from Chicago to Louisville for sure, except that it was delayed. Unfortunately, it was delayed a few hours. Finally, we made it to Louisville and were picked up at the airport by a relieved Bryan (he was missing Karen pretty fiercely, I think). We hung out for an hour or so, but took off back to Columbus as it was already 7 pm by the time we took off. That put us in Columbus at like 10:30 or 11 pm and we slept like it was our jobs.