Back to Japan

I flew home at about 8:30 Thursday morning. I had only brought one suitcase for the trip, and I was coming back with a lot more stuff. (Candy for Halloween and Christmas, supplies for activities, etc.) The suitcase came up as 62 pounds. I was prepared to pay $50, which used to be the fee for overweight luggage. Apparently the rate had changed that month, and the guy at the desk told me the fee would total $282. It's important to mention that I was not using my full allowance for checked bags: I was technically allowed 100 pounds of luggage, although it had to exist as two bags of 50 pounds each. Dad darted off to Wal-Mart and got me a $20 medium-sized suitcase that worked perfectly; the disaster was averted.

I was flying back on the route I should have taken in, which means I got to fly into Denver for the first time. The original itinerary gave me 30 minutes to make my connection in Denver, and then 1:10 to make my connection in San Francisco. The Denver-San Fran flight was delayed by 45 minutes because "the copilot's chair was malfunctioning." I distracted myself as well as I could with my datapad and the newspaper (which headlined Obama's nomination), although I was more than a little nervous about the mathematical impossibility of making my connection in negative-fifteen minutes. We apparently took a shortcut to Denver, because we got there about ten minutes early, and they held the connecting flight long enough for the five or six of us who came from Springfield. (This is precisely why I try to fly the same airline on these trips.)

The rest of the return trip was uneventful. The in-flight movies from San Francisco to Tokyo were crap, so I passed the time with On the Road and The Selfish Gene. I caught the connecting bus from Haneda to Narita airports in Tokyo, watched the pouring rain delay my Fukuoka flight for an hour, and finally got to Fukuoka at about 10:00 that night. I woke up the next morning (Saturday, thanks to the date line) and caught my flight back to Tsushima with no trouble.