All the planning and rehearsals will be put to the test tomorrow. Be sure to be on time in the morning. Bus leaves at 9:00.
Don't forget your passport, any medications but most of all your sense of humor. If anything is going to go wrong may as well have fun. Nothing is so difficult it can't be worked out together.
Ready or not here we come.
3 comments:
This is the perfect post for our adventure so far!
Ok, so I thought that you might like to know how our vacation to Japan is going... This is a long story hopefully you'll enjoy it.
Today we woke up at 7:00 am to make Spam Musubi for our Trip. We were told that the only restriction for food was liquids and that we could bring just about anything else that we would want.
By 7:45am all was done and our friend arrived to take us to the Church where we would take a bus to the airport.
We left home at 7:55am for the Church. All was going well until we got to the 101 and 280 interchange. We were planning to take 280 to 87. Anyway 280 was dead stop traffic due to an accident near 87. At 8:15 we made it to the 11th Street exit and decided to take city roads since 5th and Jackson isn't that far away. We had to be at the Church by 8:45am because the bus would be leaving no later than 9:00am. So even with the traffic and city roads we made it to the Church by 8:30 so we had time to spare!
Normally someone is late and we have to wait a little bit but we were clicking and everyone was on time so the bus actually left a little early (8:55am). All was going smooth. The ride up 101 to SFO was pretty good and we made it there by 10:00am. We have 67 people in our group and we knew that checking in can be a headache but we were clicking and everyone made it through that and we could proceed to the security check point by 10:30am. We had 2 hours to spare before our flight would leave.
Now someone mentioned that we might want to register any of our Made in Japan products to make sure that we didn't have to pay duty when we reentered; so four of us were off to customs (outside of the secure area) to register our toys. By the time we were done we had to go through the security check again - fun fun. We made it back to our gate by 11:45am. That was pretty good we killed an hour and we would be boarding the plane soon.
At 12:15 we started to board the plane.
At 12:45 on schedule we pushed away from the terminal! Yeah we would be leaving for Japan soon! From the start of the day to this point everything was perfect and we were having fun! We had to taxi and I told Wendy that we should be in the air by 1:00pm. At 1:05pm she said that we were late!
At 1:06pm we started our take off. It was kinda neat because on JAL they show a video feed from the pilots perspective so on the TV would could see the runway and a birds eye view of the take off. I thought that this was really really neat!
As we could feel the plane pick up speed and the front lift off the ground some of us heard a loud pop and crackle sound from the ceiling... Hmmm I've flown a decent amount and that sounded kinda awkward... but no one seemed to care. That is the crew seemed to think that all is well. I must just be paranoid. Well at 1:20pm the stewardess said that we would need to return to SFO for a mechanical problem that involved our landing gear. But that it would take us 40 minutes or so. Hmm we just left but it would take longer to return. We then realized that they would have to dump all of their fuel before we could land.
At 2:05pm we landed at SFO and proceeded toward a gate but we did not disembark. They were hoping to have us back up in the air a in few short amount of time. With all of horror stories that we hear about people having to sit in their seats and not allowed to use the facilities we were a little worried. But JAL was pretty good. We were allowed to walk around stretch they even brought us water, tea and coffee. They even gave us peanuts. So we were a pretty good mood.
About and hour later the captain told us that we would have to disembark and that if we showed our boarding pass to any vendors we could have spend up to $20 for lunch free! Hey that's pretty good. Too bad we got delayed but that seems awfully nice. I wonder what the catch is. Oh we need to come back to the gate to check the status of our flight at 6:00pm! Ouch! It's only 3:00pm. So we left at 1:00pm, landed at 2:00pm, disembarked at 3:00pm, and now we won't know about our flight till 6:00pm. Oh well there's nothing that we can do about it. So we knew that we missed our connecting flight in Japan and we would not get into our hotel till after midnight.
Well off the plane we go with $20 to spend. Some of us stayed near the plane to see if they were going to unload our luggage (canceled flight). Well about 30 minutes later some of the flight crew came searching for us (the passengers) to inform us that the parts to fix the plane would arrive early enough for us to take off today. So we would be delayed overnight! Oh no. We have to check back with the gate agents to see how the delay would be handled. Remember we have a group of 67 that came by chartered bus to the airport.
Well we got our group to start to reassemble as some had gone off to get food. It was now getting close to 5:00pm. Not everyone heard that the flight would be delayed over night. So now our group leaders were negotiating with the airlines for us to stay in a hotel near the airport. Logistically it would be a nightmare for us to go back to San Jose and go home; and then to have the whole group try to get back together again to get back to the airport. We can't afford the bus. So they spent the time talking with the agents.
So the time at the airport kept going on... by 7:30pm we had a hotel booked and a couple buses to take us there. The bus driver had bad directions and got lost. We ended up at a Best Western in San Mateo. We got lucky too because we took the last of their rooms. After we checked in they had no more space.
So at this time, we have a $20 allowance for dinner and $10 for breakfast. They will be sending a bus at 11:00am Friday to pick us up. Our new departure time is 1:15pm. If all goes well with that we'll arrive a day late but we should arrive in Japan. At least the flight wasn't canceled it's just delayed.
It would have been nice to go home, but with 67 people it would have been ugly to get us back up there again without any hiccups. So if all had gone well we would have been in Japan right now going through customs. Hopefully in 24 hours I won't be sending another note.
Hopefully this note is entertaining... That was why I am writing it. We hope that the next note will be full of great news from Japan!
Hi Jr. Choir! Glad that you are all safely at a hotel and will be on your way to Japan tomorrow! Now if Rev. Sakamoto writes from Japan. We'll know things are going okay!
We'll be checking the blog tomorrow (USA San Jose, July 27th)
Kathy Sakamoto
So - it's Saturday, July 28th in San Jose. The Grand Prix is in full swing. The weather's good. It's supposed to be hot, but it's still nice.
We heard from Rev. Sakamoto last night. Mr. McClure was waiting for him in Kyoto, but Rev. Sakamoto didn't know what had happened till then. He had waited in Tokyo, waited at Itami. And finally - found out what happened when Mr. McClure met him.
So now, your stay in Japan really begins. Don't forget to take lots of pictures and remember - EVERYTHING!
Kathy Sakamoto
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