Today, me, and 7 other crazy people left for Japan.

I’m typing this on the second plane we’ve been on today… It was an interesting journey getting here. There’s no wifi so the timeline might seem a bit odd.

Personally I didn’t sleep last night, could’ve been the anticipation, could’ve been the indigestion from the large pizza James and I ate the night before. Probably the second. It was regretted. Good pizza though.

Anyway, we got up at 4 and left for Dublin airport at 5, in the church minibus. We decided to avoid risk of silly traffic and leave 5 hours before we needed to be there. Of course there was no silly traffic and we arrived before check in had even opened for the SAS flight, at about 7 o’clock.

Our flight was scheduled for 11.05 so we had breakfast and began the long process of waiting. After check in and security, we discovered the flight was delayed by 2 hours… Then around 11, it was cancelled.

We went to our gate, stopping for a brief prayer, and an SAS employee informed us where to go.

And thus began the event now known as the Dot-Matrix queue. So called because the desk where flights were rebooked used a very slow dot matrix printer, and, of course it took about an hour to get through, and we were very close to the start of the queue.

We found out our flights were rescheduled to different airlines via Munich. As you can imagine, the delay to our separately booked connecting flight in Tokyo was… problematic, and we’ll have to claim off insurance to get the fee we had to pay for changing our flight to sapporo back.

Turns out this was the lesser problem.

We arrived at checkin for our first flight in our redirected route and were given quite mixed signals about our baggage. 4 of us were told it would be waiting for us in Tokyo, the other 4 were told we’d have to check it in again in Munich after baggage claim. After some discussion we eventually got onto our later 4.20 flight to Munich. One team member was not exactly taking this well, dehydration, tiredness, and lack of food didn’t help.

We had about an hour in Munich to get baggage, get checked in again, and get to the other side of the airport. Munich is a BIG airport. We were geared up for a sprint to collect the 4 bags and get to check in, and actually hit German soil running… Into a closed door. In a glass cage. In 33 degree heat. So, after a few minutes the doors opened, and chaos ensued. We ran. Robbie shoulder barged an old lady. We continued running… Into a nice German man from AVA holding our flight number and destination on it.

We stopped running.

And thanked God. There was now way we could’ve known where to go and where our baggage was without this guy, and we’re still not quite sure who told him to actually go there, we didn’t expect this help from the experience in Dublin.

We, and the other 6 passengers just made our flight to Japan. I dont think I’ll ever know that German mans name, but we thanked him as much as we could and got on our plane. At the time of writing I’m sitting in my seat, looking out over what might be Finland, and about to get my inflight meal. Without the prayers of our friends and families I don’t know if we would’ve made it.

It’s 9.51pm at home. But it’s nearly 6am in Japan i think. In 9 hours, I’ll be there. Or actually am there. Writing this in the air is confusing the tenses.

But it is (gonna be) Brilliant.

Dave, eating now. Nom nom.

FYI Finland, is beautiful from the air, at twilight. I have photos…. Somewhere.