It's 4AM here in Minnesota and Josh and I are up waiting for Gabriel to fall back asleep. Unfortunately we have been waiting for awhile and it's just not happening... but we're still hoping. This is the second time we've put him down since he got up at 1:30AM, the first time was very unsuccessful, the second time, well we will just have to see.
We made it back to Minnesota though! It was a long and awful couple of days of traveling. Josh and I got up at 7AM on Friday morning and got everything ready to head to the airport. We ended up leaving English Village at 9:30AM and took the two hour car ride to the airport. When we got to the airport we had a little problem. When we ordered Gabriel's ticket they decided to send us a paper one and they only ship to addresses in the U.S. so they had to ship it to my parents home and then my parents had to ship it to us, but we never received it. So, when we got to the airport we showed them the receipt that we had paid and his itinerary but they wouldn't accept it and made us pay for him again. The problem was, besides having to pay an extra $150 that we already paid, was that they couldn't get his ticket to print, so we waited around the airport with our many bags for 2 hours before they gave us a makeshift ticket and we could then check all of our bags. From there things seemed to go pretty well in Incheon, we made it through immigration and security without a problem and made it to our gate with an hour to spare.
We then hopped on our plane and headed to Tokyo. Now, I had been worried about the layover in Tokyo ever since we bought our tickets. It was only a 45 minute layover and we had to switch planes of course. Now 45 minutes is cutting it close but it is plenty of time to normally catch a flight... your just not going to be sipping coffee or go to the bathroom in between flights. Well in the air we find out that there are traffic delays at the airport in Tokyo and our plane was going to land 20 minutes late... oh crap. Ok, well, it's still possible, it give us 25 minutes to find our gate and get on the plane. Unfortunately because of the traffic delays they did not have a gate for us to get off on so they landed us in the middle of the airstrip and we had to take a 10 minute shuttle ride to the terminal... CRAP!!! I was so worried and was literally trying to push people aside so we could be the first people off the bus, 15 minutes left, not fun at all.
When we finally got to the terminal there was a lady waiting for us to take us to our gate. She kept yelling 'you need to run, you need to run NOW!'. Because we were outside of the terminal for a whole 10 minutes they made us go through security again, I was rather irritated to be honest! Now, the interesting thing was, when I put my bag in the scanner, it was closed, I made sure, when I was running down the terminal to get to the gate it somehow opened and all the contents of my bag started to fall out behind me. Luckily there was some very nice people who followed me picking up my stuff and we never actually lost anything.
We finally made it to our gate with 5 minutes to spare. 'Thank you God' was all that was going through my head. The door to the plane was still open and all we had to do was hop on and fly away... but they wouldn't let us. They said that we couldn't board because our bags from the previous flight hadn't been transferred fast enough and they said we couldn't fly without our bags. My thoughts? BS people! They lose bags all the time so it's not like people always fly with their bags! But we argued and told them we didn't care if our bags arrived a day late, we just wanted on the plane, but no, we weren't allowed and we missed our flight because they were being dumb.
From there everything continued to go down hill. We sat at the airport for 3 hours trying to get them to put us (and another guy who missed his flight with us, he was threatening to sue the airline) on another flight but they kept saying that they couldn't. They said that there was no other flights... BS again people! There are flights flying out from Toyko all the time AND they even found one that they were supposedly going to get us on but then all the sudden their supervisor said we couldn't and we were all going to have to wait until the next day and take the same flight at the same time. Oh I was so mad. There were flights leaving all the time the next day and they weren't willing to put us on any of them.
I was sick of sitting in the airport getting nowhere with the people so I took up their offer to put us in a hotel for the night. It then took them 45 minutes to get us a hotel voucher and in the mean time I made it clear we needed a crib and I wanted to be reimbursed for food. Well, they said that it wasn't up to them to provide those things so if we wanted a crib at the hotel we were going to have to pay for it and any food purchases (or phone calls) were going to be on us. I was livid.
We made it to the hotel to find out it was this crappy little thing with two twin beds in it and I ended up paying for the crib so we could get some sleep. I won't even tell you about the food, so nasty! Actually, I will tell you a little, imagine the nastiest, greasiest pizza possible and then place 4 thick, uncooked slabs of bacon on top of it... throwing up yet? I almost did.
I then spent the next two hours on the phone (1.5 hours of that being on hold, not joking) trying to get ANA to put us on a different flight the next day. Josh even found a flight through them that still had seats available that left at 10:45 the next morning. I kept telling them that this was the flight we wanted and they kept saying that it was impossible. I had to ask them why and they said 'oh, well you need to take the flight that you were scheduled for and that is the 5:30 flight' ... well people, if I needed to take the flight I was scheduled for then YOU SHOULD HAVE LET ME ON THE PLANE WHEN IT WAS THERE! They couldn't seem to get that through their heads and they told me they would see what they could do and call me back in the morning. They never called me back. So, I called them back and literally spent 2 hours on the phone arguing with them and they just going in circles. I even asked for a supervisor 3-4 times and they wouldn't put me through. They said that they called the airport many times and couldn't get us on the flight because of policies and crap.
Then began the longest day of our lives. Literally. I hung up the phone on the girl after she wouldn't put me through to the supervisor for the billionth time I asked (yes, I turned into one of those people, but I feel like I was totally justified) and we hopped on the bus to the airport. This was all without breakfast because the hotel didn't offer any breakfast so we weren't very happy because we were sleep deprived and now very hungry.
We get to the airport and I go to the ANA counter and it turns out that everybody knew about me =D (hehehe) They tried telling me 'oh, well you know the situation, we can't get you on a different flight'. So, I told them in pretty much these exact words 'We missed our flight, it was NOT OUR FAULT and you haven't done anything for us except put us in a crummy hotel and make us pay hundreds of dollars in phone bills arguing with YOUR company about YOUR mistake. You have 2 hours until this 10:45AM plane leaves... get me on it, MAKE IT HAPPEN'. They argued a little bit more and I said it all again and then they finally did it! We found out then why they didn't want to switch us, it was because they had to bump us up to business class when we had paid for economy. I think the words that went through my head weren't exactly pleasant... it's a good thing they didn't come out my mouth:) It might have been along the lines of 'Up yo...' maybe I shouldn't say that:)
So we made it on our flight, finally! The flight went pretty well, Gabriel didn't cry too much and he took 2 naps. We flew to Chicago where we had a little bit of trouble getting to our next flight because in Toyko they didn't give us boarding passes to our second flight so we had to go check in again and then the line for security was forever long. We ended up being the last people to board our flight there as well but we made it! We were even early arriving in Minneapolis!
It was the longest day of our lives, literally. We got up at 6AM in Toyko on Saturday morning, our plane left at 10:45AM and we landed in Minnesota at 11AM on Saturday Minnesota time. The day got even longer when we found out that time change happened that night so instead of a normal 24 hour day, ours was 39 hours. I think needless to say, I'm so glad that Saturday is over with!
I'll write more later about how things have been since we gotten back. Pretty far it's been ok, except it's now going on 5AM and I'm still up:) Actually baby boy is sleeping now, he fell asleep about 30 minutes ago... except I just heard him cry a little, anyway, I wanted to finish this blog. So, I am now going to bed for the second time tonight, or morning... whatever, something like that, I'm sleep deprived!
