Day 14

We put our luggage together (way heavier than they were in the beginning) and gave it to the hotel to hold on. We had seen a place that made awesome French Toast the night before and wanted to give it a shot. The place didn't open until 11 am. Most of the stores didn't open until 10 or 11 either. There were some stores that had people lined up outside of prior to opening. It looked like Black Friday, but I don't think anyone had any awesome deals.

We found a store with some really cool Star Wars products (they had a not for sale 4 ft.  Ewok and ewok ties), where Dave naturally bought a few things. Breakfast wound up being Mister Donut (their donuts are better than ours since they don't fry them - which is odd because they fry everything else). They had a temporary menu item of some kind of curry that was served on a cute Hello Kitty plate, but we stuck to the donuts.

I had found online two cool stores to check out, but we couldn't find either of them. No stores really have names on them, so hard to tell anyhow. The tiny flea market that we had seen here in the beginning of the trip was there and we bought a few things, and then had to go to get to the airport.

We took the Skyliner train to the airport - it's a cool-looking, futuristic train and got there pretty quickly. We checked in with Delta and checked out luggage. I had bought 2 3-day Tokyo Metro passes, but we only used 1, so we went back to return the ticket. It took forever to find, but got our money back. We did a tiny bit of shopping, but wanted to get through security and make sure we were on time. The flight was at 4:20, but the boarding time said 3:25 (which seemed really early). We went through the priority line, which was SOOOOO slow. There were about 3 people in front of us, but it took forever. Not sure if there was a shift change on the x-ray or not, but wow, it took a while. We made it through and Dave said, "hey, I know that guy over there from high school." Sure enough, his high school buddy had been in Japan and was going home on the same plane as us since he lived in Seattle and we were connecting there.

We went to the Delta Sky Club to wait for our flight thinking that we didn't have that much time. I regret not shopping the duty free a bit more, but oh well. The Sky Club was really nice and they had a nice spread. We were pretty hungry at this point, so we grabbed some food. It was finally time to board (closer to 4 pm - they board really quickly). While in line, someone was saying that the entertainment system on the plane wasn't working. Sure enough - it was true. The entertainment system with all the movies wasn't working, and neither were the overhead reading lamps. We were lucky that we had separate reading lamps on our seats, but I didn't have a book, so it didn't matter. The flight just went downhill from here.

About 30 minutes in, the flight attendants came through with a cart with drinks, including 4 full bottles on wine in a flimsy mesh crate. She promptly dumped the bottle of red wine on me. I got about 1/5 or so on me, and the rest spilled into the aisle until I grabbed it. The wine got all over my socks, my pants, and my shoes, and all over the front of the seat. She gave me a towel and I tried to clean up a bit and also needed to change socks since she drenched mine. I had on compression socks just in case, but had to put on normal ones. Then they came to ask about dinner, and only 2 of the 5 choices were left. I picked the salmon, knowing that the beef was awful from last time. The guy across the aisle from me got the beef and said it was completely inedible. He asked for something else and they told him there were no more dinners available. Once dinner was done, everyone tried going to sleep since there was nothing else to do. (There was also no WiFi on the flight, naturally).

When I put the seat back, all I smelled was red wine. I couldn't sleep at all, so I just played games on my phone. I got a little bit of sleep, but then it was time for breakfast. The one flight attendant was literally stomping through the aisles and yelling to make sure that he woke everyone up. Breakfast choices were cereal or a quiche. Dave was the 5th person to order because his side got better servic (they also had more dessert options than my side) and asked for the cereal. They told him that the 4 people before him got that, so there was none left. Seriously? Later they found 3 more cereals, so I grabbed one. What an awful flight.

We landed in Seattle and had to get our luggage to go through customs. We got through that fairly quickly, and gave our luggage to the guys there to get on board for Detroit. Then we had to go through TSA again. No one realized we'd have to do this, so everyone had water from the plane and other liquids. There were only two lines for about 200 people and they were SLOW. As in worst TSA slow even. And they were really mean and rude to the non-English speaking people, so what a great first impression. They also decided that everyone needed to go through the naked machine, even though everyone was lined up and no new luggage could go through the belt because people couldn't claim their luggage. It was absolutely pathetic and we felt bad for people with close connecting flights.

We got on the new plane, which did have working entertainment systems. Lunch was good - we both had cheeseburgers. About half way through, the flight attendants were all talking about a medical emergency (not sure what happened), but when we landed, paramedics met us. They had the people in the rows near the woman get off the plane and told the rest of us to stay there until the paramedics made it through. They were pretty quick, so we got off the plane fairly quickly. We then went to baggage claim to get our luggage. Dave's came out and we called his brother, who was picking us up to tell him, assuming that mine would be there right after. It didn't come. All of the luggage came out and still nothing. I was just about ready to cry at this point. It was like the cherry on top of the whole awful experience. We went to the luggage area and she was able to figure out that my luggage was put on a later flight. No idea why or how this happened, but at least it wasn't lost. We set it up for home delivery (they got it to me by 10 am the next day) and left since we didn't want to wait hours for them to deliver it. Then we went home where two very happy kitties greeted us and promptly decided to make homes of our luggage.