Chased across the pond by the sun...

We left Seattle around noon-thirty on Tuesday afternoon to have the terminator line chase us a third of the way around the world, only to catch us in Tokyo. We took this picture out the window of the terminal in Narita during our layover. The play of the sun in the clouds was fantastic, but it didn't dawn on me to ask Rita for the camera until it had dropped beneath them.

The flight over was uneventful, at least to Tokyo, the only problem was the seats as usual. I have no idea how an aircraft seat could be engineered to be so painful on your butt. I spent a fair amount of time wandering around the plane trying to stay out of the seat, but eventually you have to go sit back down, and continue enduring the pain. By the time we got to Narita, we both were feeling it, but not too badly. This was to change...

The flight to Singapore, while shorter than the Seattle to Tokyo run, was a bit bumpy at times, so you had to stay in your seat. Bumpy enough at one point to have R poised with her barf bag, but it calmed down to the point where her inner ear quit complaining, but not where the seat belt sign came off, so the torture continued. She managed to sleep for a few hours, I catnapped between trying to find positions where it didn't hurt so bad. I finally found a spot where if I wedged my right leg in the right position, my butt didn't hurt quite so bad, but there was a price to pay, the wedging action pressed the strap of my sandal into my little toe so hard I thought I was wearing a blister. Finally just kicked off the sandal and all was (relatively) better. I was never so glad to see Changi airport in Singapore. We called R's mom & brother to come get us, fortunately Sun, Rita's brother, only lives about five minutes away from Changi, so her mom was walking through the doors almost exactly the same time we got to them, while Sun waited outside at the curb. Boeing needs to talk to Volkswagon engineers about their seats. Sun picked us up in his Passat, and while I dreaded sitting down again, the ride to his apartment was thankfully (nearly) painless.

By the time we got to Sun's place, the sun was long since past us, and a nice moon was up in the sky. It took about twenty hours to get here, and I'm trying not to think about the trip back because it's longer flying into the sun...