Also entitled, the Joys of the International Date Line
BUT seriously. My travels started Saturday, 25 June. I woke up at 0530 and dragged myself out of bed and downstairs. Outside several of my friends had showed up to see me off. This makes them good friends because there is no way a marginal friend would get up at such a horrible hour. Heck, I was only up because this was my only chance to get out of the country.
But anyway, we drove with the McFarlands (I always feel funny writing about someone only a few of you know, but I’m sure you will get over it and someday meet my friends, or not, but since I’m not really sure how to solve this dilemma, I’ll just mention this and move on) to Goroka (or places only a few of you know exist and have any idea about, but I’ll shut up now). There we met up with the Teders who were headed out to an island for a few days, and well all boarded an Air Nuigini flight to Port Moresby. I was fortunate enough to be sitting near a window, so I took some pictures out the window as we took off. After about 50 minutes, we landed in the nation’s capitol.
(Now I know I am not supposed to say anything really critical of the PNG government, but I will anyway. Port Moresby, the capitol city, is only accessible by air, because they haven’t built good enough roads into the capitol. Besides the fact that Madang is a much cleaner, lower-crime-rate, nicer sort of city. Personally I feel the PNG gov could do better to move its centre to Madang, but that’s just me.)
We were going through check-in for our flight to Tokyo when a surprise came through the door of the airport. My very close girl “friend” had left the day before to come to Moresby, but was not leaving until the day after we were, so Ann showed up at the airport to see us. She really had no idea when we would be coming through, but showed up anyway. What a welcome surprise. We hung out at the airport until we had to go through security to get to our gate, and I had to say goodbye again.
Once on the plane things settled down. I was next to the window, so as we were banking around Port Moresby I was able to get some awesome shots of the city and the coast from the air. As we got above the clouds, I took some stunning shots. The flight itself was fairly uninteresting, but they showed Ocean’s Twelve on the plane. The movie had less of a plot than did O11. In O11, they had a well defined objective and thing they had to do, but in O12, they just were trying to pay back Benedict or else. So they scrambled their way through. The best part was how their arrests and incarceration was all part of the scam. The whole “Tess looks like Julia Roberts” thing was lame, but I’m sure I will surpass this obstacle. So I didn’t think the film was terrible, but it wasn’t as good as O11.
I took some more really good pictures of sunset, and enjoyed the rest of the flight. We landed in Tokyo and enjoyed Japanese efficiency and hospitality. We had booked rooms in a Holiday Inn, and caught a bus to the hotel. The staff of the hotel was exceedingly nice, professional, and courteous. They upgraded our rooms free of charge, because they saw four of us, and the original rooms only had one bed each. So we spent a relaxing night in Tokyo, sleeping and showering. In the bus we found an American friend that worked as a Merchant Seaman, and lived about ten minutes away from where we did in Virginia. Small world. Upon boarding our flight, we had seats in different locations, but soon realized we were surrounded by a mission’s team. They had finished six weeks of street evangelism in downtown Tokyo, and were headed back to their home in Oklahoma. So they were nice enough to trade seats with us and we got to sit together. That flight the movies were not as good as I had hoped. I saw an animated short film called Robots that featured and insane amount of voice talent for a film I had never heard about, but then I have been in a third world country for a year. Pretty funny, cute thing. And I saw the Pacifier, with Vin Diesel. Again, not a bad movie, but not the best. Heartwarming, good action, and funny. This movie lost it when it tried to be cute or Disney-ish, but managed to hold a shake-y ok-ness about it.
After a massive long flight we touched down in Dallas, and waited for about twenty minutes on the runway before getting to our gate, then we waiting forever to get our bags off the belt. In the end, we had to drop our bags and run upstairs, but to no avail, our flight would take off without us, and we had to book new tickets. We got on a little plane to Cleveland, that was cramped and cold, but two hours later we were finally done and in Cleveland.
So, due to time zones, the International date line, and traveling, we gained Sunday back as we flew, so that, when we were waiting around in Dallas to leave, we had not yet left Tokyo yet. We left on our Tokyo flight to Dallas at 1240 on Sunday. We left on our Dallas flight at 1241 on Sunday. Traveled all the way across the Pacific ocean and half of America in one minute. wow. Aren’t these time zone things funny?
So anyway, that’s the long and short of how I got 48 hours into one Sunday.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 21:44:32 and is filed under Captain\'s Log. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
