Change In Plans

This short post is about the flight from New York to Tokyo.  There is, of course, nothing short about the flight itself.

Our time at JFK was nowhere near as leisurely as we had hoped.  India managed to buy some gifts and celebrity magazines for our friends in Tokyo.  We also got some Frosted Flakes and pizza (breakfast of champions!) for the kids.  The slight time pressure, combined with our general edginess as we embark on the next leg of the trip, meant that none of us were really on our best behavior in the airport.

In the many years that India and I have been together, if there is ratty behavior in a travel situation, I am always the one who has gotten frustrated, and been curt (occasionally perhaps even rude) to an airline employee.  India is invariably the diplomatic and levelheaded one, and bails me out of these totally counterproductive encounters.

India did not lose her cool today, but she was definitely assertive in getting us through the boarding process (in part because our assigned seats were scattered all over the cabin, and we needed to get on early and start bargaining to sit together).  The gate attendants were disorganized, and there were multiple lines against boarding-pass scanners that were not working.  The female gate-attendant manager asked everyone to “please be patient, please be patient” as they moved the lines around. 

To my great amusement, as India led the passenger charge to reform the lines and get us on the plane, the manager mumbled (into her microphone): “Jesus Christ, lady.  Hold on.”  What amused me even more was that India wasn’t even aware, because she had gotten our boarding passes scanned and was already charging down the runway.  To complete the role reversal, I smiled and shrugged my shoulders at the manager, and said “Sorry.”

We splurged on business-class seats for our OnePass “round-the-world” tickets.  They are only marginally more expensive, and for flights this long, with kids, it feels like a good deal. We persuaded our fellow passengers to swap seats and let us all sit together (great quote from a tall businessman in his 50s: “I would be delighted for you to sit next to the eight-year-old boy instead of me).  Once we got settled, both kids were thrilled to have reclining seats and TVs and little vanity kits to play with.  Zola still thinks that business class is wildly glamorous.

Despite the boarding drama, we took off late from JFK (naturally), and climbed through the clouds into the perpetual daylight of the trip to Asia.  It is a ridiculously long flight (13 hours with favorable winds), but we seem to be amusing ourselves.  It has been fun for me to listen to Zola as he laughs uproariously while watching the 2-hour cartoon special.  It has also been fun to see him, the pickiest eater I have ever known, react to his first Japanese food.  He may lose a few pounds in the coming weeks.  We were a little surprised when we flew almost directly over Churchill, Manitoba, where we were watching polar bears only a few days ago.

Both kids are pretty good travelers, which is an enormous blessing.  We seated Zola behind Tallulah, so when he kicks the seat in front of him, it is all in the family.  He spilled a glass of water, of course, but we managed to catch his glass of milk.  Tallulah actually slept for a couple of hours, but the rest of us have been gorging on movies (Hancock, Little Miss Sunshine, Get Smart, Batman) playing Battleship, doing crossword puzzles, and reading magazines.

I think we will pay in jet lag for all of this non-productive fun we are having on the airplane.  We have scheduled two very low-key days in Tokyo when we land, so we hope that will get us through the worst of it.  If not, we can always go hang out with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansen in the hotel bar.