Travel Woes

Alright.  Now that I've had some time to get settled in, time to talk about how I got to Tokyo.  I can think of it as a funny story now, but at the time I was less than happy about the way things went.

As I mentioned earlier, my layover time in Los Angeles was to be a bit short, so I was slightly concerned about making my connecting flight.  We board the plane in Atlanta on time, but we find out once everyone is on the plane that the pilot has yet to arrive.  Apparently he had flown in from Detroit and was walking through the terminal.  He makes it to the plane about 5 minutes after that, but it's another 30 minutes before the plane is even close to ready to wheel out of the terminal.

Before we really start heading out to the runway, we stop for a few minutes before the pilot informs us that our route to LA is congested.  They end up having to recalculate the route twice, with another delay on take-off.  All said and done, we're late departing by about an hour and a half.  This makes me really worry now.

My flight to Tokyo was supposed to depart at 12:40pm local from LAX.  My flight from Atlanta doesn't touch down until 12:20.  I try to run to the gate for my next flight, which was not in the same terminal as was originally scheduled.  Unfortunately, the flight is long gone.  So now I'm exhausted and not sure how I'm going to make it to Japan.  We eventually work it out where I'll fly from LAX at 1pm local on Monday, and the lady sends me down to collect my bag, which she reflagged so I could take it with me to the hotel.

Unfortunately, my bag never showed.  We eventually determine that the bag is in the airport, but there is only one bag person on duty for this area this late at night, around 1:30am pacific.  He says he knows approximately where it is, but he's busy and doesn't know when he can get around to finding it.  So I have to choose between for possibly waiting more than an hour for them to find my bag, or I go to the hotel without my clothes for a night.  I choose the hotel.

The next morning, I give myself a heart attack by almost leaving all my cash (foreign and US currencies) in the hotel restaurant, but I make this flight just fine.  It was a pleasant flight for the most part since we were running light on passengers.  I had a whole row to myself.  I'll have more later about wandering around Shinjuku tonight, but right now I'm tired and need sleep.