As you may already know... this trip is a special trip to Japan for my mom. She's never been to Japan before and always wanted to go. I wanted to take her before she gets too old and can't walk... she's in good shape now and walks more than me, so I knew she could handle.
Also joining us on our adventure is my sister Denise. She is the other half of Sister Stamps, in case you follow my other blog: sisterstamps.blogspot.com. She is an artist that freelances for Disney and other studios but lives in Italy. Sis had to travel in the opposite direction to meet us for this adventure.
It all started about a year ago, I told Mom that we'd be taking her to Japan if she wanted to go. After my stepdad passed away a couple of years ago, she was kind of in a daze. But last year, she started to feel better and it seemed like the right time to plan the trip, so we booked our flight and never looked back!
As I mentioned before, my LA trip was postponed, so I was dying to get out of Hilo for awhile, but waited patiently because I knew my Tokyo trip was coming up in a few months. After a few LONG months, our trip is finally here!!!
We left on Friday, April 24th and let me tell ya, that was the longest short week in the history of work. I worked long hours that week to get my work done before my vacation, but I managed to get it all done in time.
Finally, it was travel day! We had a tearful goodbye from Akemi and then we were on our way. Here we are before our inter-island trip to Honolulu.
Paul took this photo of Mauna Kea from the plane... Bye Bye Hilo!
After we arrived in Honolulu, we met up with Mom at our gate... or what we thought was our gate! Luckily mom called and we found out our gate had changed. Thank goodness! Then we were off on our epic Tokyo Adventure III to Haneda on Hawaiian Airlines.
Although the flight was shorter than anticipated, it still felt really long. I think its cause we tried really hard not to sleep the entire flight like we usually do. Hoping that that will help reduce the jet lag. I was happy to see my favorite movie Pitch Perfect was an option on the in-flight movies! Yay!
Finally, we landed in Tokyo!! Woo Hoo! We landed almost an hour early, which was good. And Hawaiian now distributes the immigration and customs forms on the plane so we got through much quicker than normal. Yay! Then we headed to the monorail and hopped on. Here's our first pic in Tokyo!
Then we checked in and went to bed. The next morning we had to wake up early to meet my sister, so we needed to get some rest. Will write more about that in my next post! Sayoonara!
Just curious, how long was your flight to Haneda? Our flight was from Hnl to Osaka was a grueling 9 hours and 45 mins. Return flight from Osaka was 7 hours and 35 mins. What a difference.
ReplyDeleteOur flight was a little over 8 hours going to Haneda and a little over 7 hours going home. For some reason we thought it was going to be 10 hours?
Delete