Traveling Pains: Part 1

Hello everyone and welcome back to Stir-Fried Tango. Today I begin my travel series talking about where all I went over the past week.

Recently I made some plans to visit a friend in Osaka because I’m on break from school. I bought a plane ticket from Narita to Kansai, I stole someone else’s plans on where to go. I got what I needed to take and packed it all up (maybe too much though, I do tend to over pack and over prepare.)

Then it happened. So lately I’ve been having these weird stomach aches and I’m not really sure why, but less than an hour before we had to leave I’m doubled over in pain laying on the bed. It’s actually been weird because lately I’ve not been having this happen many times. So time starts ticking by until finally I can move again, then we rush out the door, with no extra time. It was only then I realized that I forgot to leave time for waiting on the bus.

10 minutes late already.

We arrive at the train station with our stolen plans (Darth Vader voice: "what have you done with those plans?") and get on the train to Tokyo, then switched lines. The stop where we were supposed to hop onto the Narita Express was where we messed up. We were on the right track but got on the wrong train. Yes, we did realize it was the wrong one pretty quickly but the doors had already closed and we couldn’t get off. Now it wasn’t too tragic we were still going in the right direction, just on a slower moving train. So once we got a chance we tried switching to a faster one. Switched to faster line.

30 minutes late.

Finally, we arrive at Narita and run all the way to boarding, with all of our luggage in tow… when I say run, I mean a slow hobble because we are half asleep, loaded down with luggage, and Christine doesn’t run. We manage to get in a slide up to the terminal only to find out, the plane takes off in 1 minute.

40 minutes late…

Check in = missed,

Flight = missed,

Us = sad.

We trudge over to a bench all depressed we missed our flight, I had already tried seeing if there were any other ways for us to get to Osaka, but it was impossible. We had already been planning on getting on the last flight for the day, the over-night buses were reservation only, and the Shinkansens had stopped running for the day. We were grounded.

We talked about what we should do. Should we give up and go home? Try next week? We really wanted to go and school would be starting again soon. If we didn’t leave we may not even get the chance while we are here in Japan. We didn’t know what to do.

Tune in next time folks for Part Two of Traveling Pains.