Tokyo Diary - Day 1b/2a - The Flight from Seattle to Tokyo

Geoff and I found our seats in row 26 quite easily. The Boeing 777 is set up with 5 seats in the center and 2 seats between the aisle and the window, so Geoff got the window seat and I had the aisle. Cruising at 30-some-odd thousand feet means that except for about 15 minutes after take-off and before landing, your only view is the tops of clouds. I much prefer the extra space of having the aisle and being able to get up and stretch easily.

We settled into our seats and it was not long before we were taxiing down the runway and up in the air.

I noticed on the in video GPS that to go from Seattle to Tokyo the plane flies all the way to Alaska! Guess it has something to do with the earth’s bulge so that a the shortest distance is not always a straight line.

It seemed that the ‘Fasten Seatbelt’ light was not off more than 10 minutes and the flight crew was bringing us lunch. Had a great beef dinner with spinach (Von make more spinach).

After dinner we had 4 or so movies to choose from. I watched one and then went on to finish listening to a book on tape that I had recorded onto my Tungsten T3 that I can use as an MP3 player.

You will notice that this post is labelled Day 1b/2a. That is because at 6pm Seattle time we crossed the international date line near the tip of the Aleutian Islands up in Alaska. Since there would be a 4 hour time difference, I am guessing at 2pm on the 27th it suddenly became 1 pm on the 28th! (Someone can correct me if I made a mistake here).

They came around with snacks 2 times during the flight and then before we landed they served us lunch. Again another great meal. My only regret was that I had a beer with lunch and I think it upset my stomach just enough when we started to land about an hour later.

The plane landed at 3:30 pm but we taxied half way across the country before the plane finally stopped. It must have been close to 4:00 pm before we got off the plane. But there were no lines when we arrived at customs so we just whisked through the lines there and the wait for the baggage was not bad either.

We then scoped out the terminal and decided we had better change our Dollars into Yen. We deciphered the forms needed to change the currency and now had a bunch of colorful money in our hands.

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