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Around the World 2008
I was able to get the month of August off from work, and Tabitha wasn't exactly working either, so we decided to do some traveling. I had been wanting to take a trip around the world just for the sake of doing it, so it sounded like we had a good opportunity. My original intent was just to fly around with minimal stops - about a 3-day proposition. Back when I was working at FedEx, I almost got to ride around on a 747. One of my co-workers at the time, JB, proposed an alternative. "Just come by my house, and I'll take everything out of the garage except for a lawn chair. Then, I'll close the door and come check on you every 8 hours. After 2 days, I'll let you out and you will have had the same experience." He had a good point!Back then the trip didn't work out, but these days we are able to get discount travel since I'm an airline employee. We would use ZED passes to fly on companies other than mine, and that would make such an otherwise inefficient trip possible. Tabitha pretty much objected to the "see how fast we can do it" version (aka the lawn chair/garage experience) so we started planning some stops. It seemed only logical to take my company as far west as we could- HNL, then resume on-line flying when we got to a European city with our service. This would minimize our cost, since the fare would be free. ZEDs are certainly cheaper than full fares, but they are not free.
We also knew that we wanted to stop in MUC since that's where Amy and Peter are living. Tabitha expressed interest in stopping in Athens, Cairo, Finland, Ireland, England, etc. Her friend Christina was able to get two weeks off from work, so they decided to get together for the Germany, France, Ireland, England part. We started looking at flights, and pretty quickly realized that even a month was not enough time to see all of those places. ZED passes are for standby travel, meaning that if there isn't a seat available, we don't get to go. That means that we have to build some flexibility into the whole plan, which makes it even harder to have a fast-paced schedule.
Our first leg was from CLT to PHX, which gave us an option from PHX to HNL that had some room.
But we weren't able to get on the CLT-PHX leg because it was full. The next PHX flight might have gotten us that far, but then the rest of the PHX-HNL flights were full. We decided instead to go to LAX, thinking that there were lots of good options to get from LAX to HNL. When we got to LAX, we tried to get on a couple of flights, but they were all completely full. The gate agents were telling us that since Aloha and ATA stopped operating that summer, everyone else's flights were always super-full. We went to a hotel for the night and came back to the airport early on the next day. The HNL flights were still very full, so we decided instead to just skip Hawaii and go directly to Japan. We didn't really have any sights in mind in Japan, but it was just a logical stop from a geographical standpoint. American had a flight from LAX to NRT that had plenty of seats available, so we took that one.
Once we were in our seats and airborne, I got out the camera to document our success. We were even able to get seats together, which is a bit of a miracle any time we travel standby. We took a picture of the meal service (number 3 below) and the flight attendants got a big kick out of that. It was as though they didn't realize that there is no such thing as meal service on domestic flights anymore. Seeing a flight attendant deliver a hot meal on a flight is about like seeing a bright orange seagull, so photo documentation was in order.
Tabitha took several pictures of the "airshow" screen that showed our position and speed and such. Here are a few of them.
We each had our own screen that we could use to flip through the various movies and such, and that helped pass the 10 hours that it took to fly across the pacific.
Once we got there, we went to the information desk to ask about hotels. We arrived at about 4:00 in the afternoon, and had to be back at the airport at about 9:00 the next morning, so we weren't even going to bother with trying to get into Tokyo. There were several hotels available in Narita, and we found one for 10700 yen for the night. It turns out that the conversion rate is about 100 to 1, making our hotel about $107. The hotel offered complimentary transportation to and from the airport, and they also had a shuttle that went into the busy part of town. We waited for the bus, and Tabitha said "is this our bus?" Jared said "no, it's this one I think." Then we got on the bus and hoped that it was the right one.
The hotel was nice on the outside, and we were able to check in with no trouble. Here you can see some pictures of the room. We were especially impressed with how well the room was stocked. They had all sorts of complimentary items, even including toothbrushes and toothpaste. The alarm clock was built into the bed stand, and there were electronic "do not disturb" and "service" buttons. The same piece of furniture also had a neat floor-light feature that would have made a nice night light.
Then Tabitha started going through the drawers and found the best part- the sleeping clothes.
We took the bus to town and took a few pictures once we got there.
Our intended destination was the temple that you can see the start of in the last picture above. I'm sure it would have been even more impressive in the daytime, but it was still interesting in the dark. There were lots of intricate symbols on just about any place that had room to put them. Some of the buildings seemed to be 1000 years old.
We walked around for a little while and promptly realized that we were going to need to have some food. We didn't want to bother with getting any Yen, since we were only going to be there for a few more hours. Lots of the restaurants were already closed, and by limiting ourselves to ones that accepted credit cards, we only had a few to choose from. We would have liked to have had traditional Japanese food, but we couldn't find any. Instead we opted for the Irish pub. That's globalization for you.
We saw this nice motorcycle on our way back to the bus stop. When we got back to where we thought we were supposed to be to catch the bus, we realized that it didn't look very familiar. We asked for help from a gentleman in a police-looking uniform and he tried to tell us how to get to where we needed to go. We weren't understanding, so he just walked us over to the right spot. It was very nice of him for sure. When we got back on the bus, we both almost immediately fell asleep. We woke up when we felt the bus moving backwards, and Tabitha suggested that it may be at our stop. The bus served three different hotels, so there was a degree of uncertainty in addition to our groggy decision process. We hopped up and walked to the front, and were able to get off at what ended up being our correct hotel. It didn't take long for me to realize that we might have been riding on the bus for a while. It just makes the loop from the three hotels to downtown, so this could have been the first or fifth time that they went by our hotel. It seemed most likely that it was actually our first option to get off, since it was still only about 8:30pm. We both went right to sleep and got up early the next morning so that we could go to the airport.
Tabitha had left her hat on the inbound flight, so she wanted to go see if the American lost and found had it. It took quite a bit of discussion to make the point that we weren't able to wait until 10:00am for the regional lost and found office to open. Somehow Tabitha was able to get the people there to go back into the back and emerge with her hat, which was a source of great glee for her.
We got onto a Lufthansa flight for FRA and were once again able to get seats together. The first picture below is the plane in NRT, just as we were getting ready to board. We were able to get some sushi from an airport kiosk, which was a relief. We wouldn't have wanted to go all the way to Japan without getting some sushi.
The last picture is Tabitha sitting in the Frankfurt airport after the flight. Our next stop was Athens Greece, and we were able to connect at FRA.
Click here to continue with the story
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