The Final(?) Post - Japan, Texas, and Utah.

Surprise, everyone, we are back in the good ol' US of A!  We sure are grateful to make our return, grateful that we went, and grateful to you, our wonderful readers for following along on our exploits, adventures, and misadventures!  So, in this our final(?) post, we have one last tale to tell, that of our return!

"RETURN FROM THIS?!?!?!" everyone keeps asking us.  Maybe with even more exclamation marks.

Yes it's true, and it was easy to do, at least conceptually.  Physically it was quite a different story, as in the vaguely Indiana Jones-ish map below.

AAAAAAHHHHHHH We're doing WHAT?!

Rather than face a 34-hour non-stop travel day, we broke it up into two separate but equally terrible travel days. 

Day 1: Tuesday, January 29th
We hung out on the beach for one last time and at 2:00 p.m. took to the Koh Tao taxi (a Toyota Hilux with bench seats welded in the bed) to the pier, waited for 1 hour, took a 2 hour ferry ride back to Koh Samui, waited for  1 1/2 hours at the airport, took a 1 hour flight to Bangkok, waited for 3 hours at the airport, then took a 6 hour flight from Bangkok to Tokyo, arriving at 6:00 a.m and our hotel at 8:00 a.m. 
Total travel time: 17 hours, we think.

One last bit of Bangkok-ery.  Oh how we'll miss your quirky English.

We got totally hosed by our hotel in Japan, who literally had the worst customer service in THE WORLD!  They wouldn't let us in our room so we had to wait ,exhausted, in the lobby for 4 hours until noon to check in, despite the fact we'd notified them of our early arrival and even then had to pay a TON to get our room early.  We'd hoped to see some of Tokyo with our 1 day stop over, but by the time we got a room we were too exhausted to do anything but sleep.  And get sick.  Thanks, weasels.

We finally wandered out to get some food, and discovered three facts: 1)everything in Japan is in Japanese, 2)no restaurants accept debit/credit cards, 3)Japanese ATMs are a combination of #1 and #2: they are in Japanese and don't accept our our debit card.  This left us in quite a pinch as we coldly wandered around (unsuccessfully) in the dark looking for friendly ATMs until we spied the Asian travelers best friend:

We LOOOOOOOVVVVVEEEE you!!!!

7-eleven has saved us, fed us, has always been safe, reliable, cheap, familiar, and is EVERYWHERE in Thailand, and we have grown to love and appreciate it.  Once again it came to our rescue, and as we were sick and in Japan, we bought some orange juice and "Cup of Noodles" (with our credit card, which was the real clincher) and made them with the coffee pot in our room.

Not impressed with Japan...

Our cashier was possibly the friendliest person on the planet, who looked impossibly pleased that these strange white people were in his 7-eleven, gave us some sweet chopsticks for our noodles, and merrily babbled away in Japanese while ringing up our food.  One can only wonder what he was saying, but he never stopped smiling or talking, and all we knew to say was "domo arrigato."  Yet another point for 7-eleven, and we seriously discussed sending the 7-eleven corporation a thank-you card.  Sorry we didn't appreciate your awesomeness before, 7-eleven!

The next morning our flight was at noon from a different airport than the one we flew in on, so we left at 8:00, hoping to get there around 10:00, which is what our Google directions said it would take.  What Google didn't tell us is that we were about to embark on our last, most difficult, and probably impossible public transport adventure.

Our directions were something banal like "Go to the train station, go 20 stops towards Yoshigota, change to the Honkiogo train and go 13 stops to the Narita airport."  "Sounds easy enough." says I to the wife, "Lets just confirm at this helpful bus-sized map:"


"BY THE POWER OF GREY SKULL, WHAT IN THE NAME OF ZEUS IS THAT?!?!?!" is what my brain immediately yelled at me.  After a few seconds looking at it I could no longer function, just stare, open-mouthed and drooling, as this crazy contradiction of coordinates reduced my logical, engineering brain to a frightened, tiny, shrieking lemur in the darkest corner of  my suddenly vacant skull.

Pretty much...

We knew we had to do something, so we plucked up our courage and chose one of the two amazingly packed trains and got on.  Still trying to figure out what the heck we were doing, we pulled out the directions and started trying to figure out the smaller map on the train.  A nice Japanese guy about my age noticed our beady eyes and confused faces and stood up to help us, and spoke good, not great, English.  He was automatically our best friend, and after looking up some information on his smart phone, told us we should get off with him, and he would point us to the next train, and indicated our directions were pretty much the dumbest thing he'd ever seen.  So we got off a few stops later with him, he took us to a platform, told us to go to the "sheotaiotnegbbwoy" or something station, then take the "howdieitnaoe #48" train, and then disappeared. 

Every train we took for the first hour, with our packs on our backs.  Travel isn't always smiles and sunshine, folks.

So we stood there trying to remember the name, the crowded train came, and we got on.  We got off at the right station but we could no longer remember the next train, so we stood looking at all the different trains and directions.  We finally decided on one, and were about to go to that train when another kind lady noticed our crazed looks and asked if she could help.  We told her the airport name, and followed her as she spoke to the station guard at the train we were going to go to.  He said something, and most surprisingly, she took off running down the platform.  We ran after her, and she finally stopped to talk to another guard, at the other end of the platform, and they indicated we should get on that train, and HURRY!  After another few "domo arrigato's" As we were pushing our way on, I saw the train separate in the middle, the other half going who knows where, and our half going, hopefully, eventually, to the airport.  Yikes!  But we looked at the map on our latest train...

For the first time in  1 1/2 hours, we know where we are!  Just not where we're going.

Finally, some good news!  Not only did we see another white backpacker, we finally got to sit down and look at a smaller map for our current train's part of town and noticed the stops were a combination of letter and number, and that the number was going up.  We found the airport, and noticed it was the same letter, and a high number!  Yay!!!  Now the question was: are we on the airport train, which only makes a few stops, or the local train, that stops every kilometer and would cause us to miss our flight?  As we talked to our new Australian friend who is a poet publishing his first book and will be traveling around the world for 2 years(!), we noticed we were stopping a lot.  We'd been stopped for 10 minutes at a station, and noticed not only had most of the people gotten off and were standing on the other platform, but that a guy was giving me the "what the heck are you doing?" look out of the corner of his eye.  So we jumped off, stood in line behind that guy who now seemed silently relieved, and the train came and we were whisked off to the airport, where we had to pay a 360 yen ticket adjustment for all the extra trains we'd taken.  But we were there, and with plenty of time to spare.  Whew!

Soooooo,
Day 2:
Leave hotel at 8:00 a.m., 2.5  hours on the trains of Tokyo, 1.5 hour wait at the airport, 11 hour flight from Tokyo to Dallas, 1.5 hour wait in Dallas, 3 hour flight to Salt Lake City. 
Total Time:19.5 hours
Total Travel Time in a 3 day period: 36.5 hours.

The fun part was we took off from Tokyo at 12:00 p.m. on January 31st, and landed at 11:50 a.m. on January 31st.  Weird.

So now we are back, and the future of this blog is uncertain.  Moving forward we are just expecting more ordinary lives, getting jobs, moving, etc, nothing nearly as exciting as we have been doing.  We may continue to blog about more domestic things, or may discontinue it, but either way we are really blessed to have been able to have such a fantastic trip and keep such a fine(?) record of it.  Thank you all for following along and being a part of it, we have had a lot of fun making this blog and hope you have had fun reading it!