Our airport parking lot, On Time Airport Parking at Gibson and Yale has a Ghostbusters car much like this one at the entrance. They also have a slew of beautiful vintage cars under covered parking. If you have extra time and love cool old cars, take a few minutes to wander around the lot.
Once at the airport, we managed to sleepwalk our way through the airport and get on the correct flight. Note to international fliers: American airlines now has you present your passport a second time when boarding. So keep your passport handy till you are in your seat in each flight.
At Dallas/Fort Worth, we got to walk through this cool castle to get to our gate. We had a quick turnaround, especially as we had to gate check our carryon bags, so we hopped on the sky train to get to our gate more quickly. I certainly didn’t want to miss my flight to Tokyo.
The airplane itself had fun high tech goodies, especially if you were in first class or business class, which unfortunately, I wasn’t. (They got super cool sleeping pods!) Still, there were some great features even at our economy level. I loved being able to plug in two devices at my seat. They also offered between seat chat messaging, which would be a fun way to distract the kids. And of course, they offered a ton of movies with free earpods. I always find the background noise of the jet makes the movie hard to hear at safe levels. If you like to watch movies, you might want to bring your own noise cancelling headphones for the best experience.
The food at lunch was pretty decent for an airline but not spectacular. It was an Americanized version of a Japanese main dish, some fun edamane treats and a churro cookie that bore no similarity to New Mexico churto. Later snacks were good enough and a welcome break from the monotony of sitting on a plane for hours on end (our two flights totalled 16 hours). They did serve free wine as a beverage choice, which while not recommended if trying to avoid jet lag, was quite tasty. A later salted caramel ice cream was another welcome break.
The view out the window was lovely but usually we were told to keep the shades down so a window seat wasn’t much of a plus on this flight. Ray and I had adjoining aisle seats, which felt less crowded, especially as we got lucky and each had an empty seat next to us.
Ray always loves the flight map and our seats had a personalized version with all sorts of cool options including a preview of the flight track. One really cool thing that I hadn’t encountered before was the “sunrise” lighting, which went from dark, to a dusk- light blue to pinks and then to brighter yellow and orange tones. It did make an easier transition than just going from dark to light.
We made it to Narita airport! Customs was a smooth, high tech process. The only glitches were caused by me filling out my form with a dark reddish purple ink. Only blue or black are permitted so I had to redo the form. They scan both index fingers for fingerprints and do a retinal scan. Both Ray and I took our fingers off the scanner when it went beep. Wrong! One must wait for the staff person to give you permission to remove your fingers.
Narita airport isn’t as crowded and overwhelming as I expected.
For my anime loving friends, there is a separate anime tourism business here.
Travels with Owen 