We are in Japan!

Backtracking a little to get this blog caught up again -

Monday, October 21st.
After a leisurely morning, we left on our drive to Houston at around 12:30pm.  We drove to my friend Melanie's house where we will be spending the night tonight.  We got to her house around 5:10 and had a most wonderful evening with her and her husband Buck.  We went to bed that night so excited about our trip the following day.  Of course, knowing we were going on such a big trip (and also being in a new place) we didn't sleep as well that night as we would have liked.  Surely was no fault of the comfortable bed and the nice room we were in - that's just how we are before taking a trip!

Tuesday, October 22nd.
Melanie took us to the airport at 7:30 this morning for our 9am flight to Seattle.  The flight left somewhat late but it got us to Seattle on time.  The plane flew really close to Mount Rainier and that was such a beautiful sight to see.  We actually could see 4 volcanic peaks from the plane as we were flying - Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens and not sure about the 4th one.  It was about a 4 hour flight.  We were so glad to have broken up our flight with a stop in Seattle instead of getting a non-stop from Houston to Tokyo.  We were ready, by the time the plane landed in Seattle, to get out of our seats and walk around a little and get something good to eat.  The plane to Tokyo took off just a little late and we were on our way!  Wow, Nippon Airlines is a nice airline to fly with!  We made sure to get something to eat before we got on the plane because our paperwork had said no meal would be served on the plane.  That was so wrong because almost immediately they started bringing little things for us to munch on and the next thing we knew, they were serving a meal!  So, that was our first Japanese meal and I should have taken a picture of it!

We had thought the flight from Seattle to Tokyo would be an 11 hour flight but shortly after we took off, we noticed on the flight map that it said 8+ hours to destination.  When we saw that we were so surprised and felt like this leg of the trip wasn't going to be that bad after all.   We had decent seats in that they weren't a tight fit and there seemed to be plenty of leg room but they were only two together so we really couldn't stretch out to lie down.  Here's a picture of our plane just passing the International Date Line.  And just like that we went from October 22nd to October 23 in an instant.

The time went quickly though and before we knew it, we were getting ready to land in Tokyo.  That was such an unbelievable feeling to see Japan down below and to know that we were soon going to be in Japan!!  And we didn't feel all that tired!  I guess we were just too excited and happy knowing we were about to see Fernando and Eva.

They met us as we came out of the baggage and customs area.  How nice it was to see Fernando waving to us as we looked around for them in the crowd of people!  Now it was on to catching 3 different trains for the hour long trip to their apartment.  At that point, it was about 2:30am for us.  And actually, it wasn't until we were on the last train that we started feeling the tiredness set in.  Once at Fernando's apartment, we had a nice dinner and then turned in early.