Monday March 31st and Tuesday April 1st 

It all started so well.............

A trouble free drive to Heathrow in the sunshine meant that we arrived at Heathrow 4 hours in advance of the departure time, but at least that gave us time to complete all the check in formalities without feeling rushed. It's 8 years since we last went anywhere by plane and we found all the automated check in and baggage drop procedures a bit impersonal - no smiling staff to speed us on our way!

I managed to accrue nearly 5000:steps by wandering the duty free areas, although it didn't take long to realise that very few of the prices were any cheaper than I could find online, which made me think that all the different outlets were really there to advertise the brand rather actually sell anything!

We finally got the call to make our way to the departure gate - it turned out to be just about the furthest one in the terminal and after sitting around for another 20 minutes were not happy to hear that our flight would be delayed, however fortunately it wasn't for long and we were soon settled in our Premium Economy seats aboard a Boeing 777  - Trev was very excited about this as it was his first time on one of these huge planes, he was even more excited to discover that he could watch a view from the cockpit complete with altitude gauge and speedometer as we took off! 



I kept my eyes firmly averted at this point and concentrated on my codeword puzzles!

We were ready for a long flight - the nine hours from Heathrow to Hing Kong were filled with the usual mix of drinks, food and inflight entertainment ( a pleasant couple of hours watching Robert Redford, and a few minutes watching Angelina Jolie portray Maria Callas which I wouldn't recommend!) then time spent trying to get some sleep. Unfortunately a decent stretch of sleep eluded me and the hours before we reached Hong Kong really dragged, punctuated by the occasional patch of turbulence, disturbing at first, then I gradually got used to it and became interested in checking out the in flight map to discover which obscure part of the world we were flying over at that point.

We only had a short time to kill in Hong Kong airport before it was time to find our way to the departure gate for the onward journey to Tokyo. It was a good job we had left plenty of time for this as we discovered that our departure gate this time was also miles away- another 2,000 steps in fact! This time, the 777 was a much older version of the plane which shook, rattled and made lots of other disconcerting noises all through take off! 

Around 4 hours later we touched down in Tokyo after an uneventful flight, relieved to finally at our destination and looking forward to a decent nights sleep in a real bed! We didn't know that the next 3 hours were going to be spent trying to get through immigration, and then waiting in the baggage collection hall while the remainer of our 40 strong group came through.

 It was a scene of total chaos, with a huge scrum of people from a whole series of flights all trying to get through to the final area of 30 or more long zigzag lines which turned out to be the final approach to the actual immigration counter. The ironic part of all this was that we had all dutifully downloaded the 'Vist Japan' app before departure which  ' promises to speed up your entry into the country'. 😬😬

We were all so completely exhausted by now that none of us had much energy other than to collapse straight into bed as soon as we reached our hotel. It was 3.30 am Japanese time at this point - we had left home around  24 hours ago!

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