Sweet Home Alabama

Leaving Japan for a Much Deserved Vacation
Saturday, December 22, 2007

Tara and I did not go to bed last night, but instead we spent the time cleaning, doing last minute packing, and just staying awake. Our theory was that if we stayed up all night, we would be able to sleep through the whole plane ride. Here I am on the plane…not sleeping. That’s not really fair to say though because I have slept about 6 hours of the ride which is half.

It was so surreal actually making the journey to get to the station. It wasn’t like just driving to the airport at home; it was much more extensive than that. First we have to go to the train station in town. Then we rode the Shinkansen (fast train) to Osaka. From Osaka we switched trains to a local train line that took us straight into the airport. That took us about two hours.

When we got here we had to go pick up all of the luggage that we sent ahead. It was well worth the money I spend to send my bags earlier in the week. They were so big and bulky that trying to ride and change trains with them would have been a nightmare.

We got in like to check out luggage. Between the 6 of us going to America, there were 15 pieced of luggage. I am not going to tell you how many of those were mine! That was terrible but we did it. We thought we were going to have a long time to shop around duty free, but by the time we grabbed lunch and got through security, it was past time to board out flight.

Tara and I didn’t fare too well with security today. We had SO much stuff that had to go into separate trays…cell phones, computers, our liquids baggie, coats, purses, etc. It was comical. Then Tara kept setting the machine off. She has to undress piece by piece…belt, shoes, scarf, etc. She STILL was beeping so they had to do the wand. While that was going on, I was setting the thing off with my shoes. I had to take off my shoes and go back and forth through the thing. Finally I stopped beeping and then he had to run my shoes through. Tara and I were thinking, “We don’t want to hurt anyone. We just want to shop duty free!!!” That idea was shot though; there would be no duty free shopping in my future today. :( Probably for the better though.