As I write this, it's the morning after our travel day. Which is the evening after our travel day, back home. But time is meaningless is this sort of cat and squid game.
Waking up on the 14th floor of a luxury hotel in the third-most-popular prefecture for Japanese people to vacation to is an odd experience. The view is nice, the weather is brisk, and we had konbini dinner last night. [Tuna Mayo remains unrivaled in the onigiri department.]
How did we get here? Well, it's a tale as old as time.
CVG > ORD. ORD > NRT. NRT > CTS.
Oh, you wanted like, details and anecdotes and stuff. Okay, sure.
Did you know they took out the Starbucks in favor of a Dunkin' Donuts on Concourse A at CVG? Definite downgrade. They can't make a chai latte to save their lives. Otherwise, the seats at the airport were comfy, we breezed through security because we have righteous hearts and therefore never have to wait in line for more than a few minutes [Editor's Note: More to come on this stance later in the blog.].
The flight to ORD was on United, which meant that it was the most Medium Airplane Experience possible in These United States. Nothing awful, nothing awesome. Just a 5/10 plane time. I do not like that they don't allow you to print paper boarding passes at the kiosk and expect you to use an app. This is one of my severe-est Boomer Traits(tm). I want a paper boarding pass, because what happens when your app invariably crashes? Or I run out of battery for my device? Or there's an EMP or something? Boarding passes were loaded up for all three flights, despite my protestations to the contrary, and off we went.
ORD. Man, ORD and I do not get along. Not just because I Was Right about the electronic boarding passes, but also because Chicago Hot Dogs are a pox. As soon as we deplaned from our United flight, the next two segments of boarding passes just... disappeared from the app. Why would that happen? What awful design is this? After a moment of mild panic, we went up to the All Nippon Airlines counter at ORD and they reprinted the boarding passes for us. Like United should have done in the first place. [There is a time and a place for eco-friendliness. International boarding passes is not one of them.] (This is Angie, hi! Thanks to Eva at the ANA counter for printing our boarding passes and also double checking to make sure my checked bag was on board! She was so patient and sweet!)
The ANA flight from ORD to NRT is always a loooooooooong time. You can watch the entire Lord Of The Rings extended edition trilogy and still have almost two whole hours of flight time left. Madness. So you can imagine my consternation when I saw this for my In Flight Entertainment.
[ANA uses a Red Hat Linux fork from 2006 to manage their IFE in 2026. This is hilarious to me.]
Thankfully, we never show up unprepared and both had enough media downloaded on our various devices, just in case the IFE was down. Thankfully, her screen worked and mine was back up and running within an hour. (Angie: The IFE was just fine, it had lots of new movies. Jeff doesn't prepare for long flights like I do, which is to say: correctly. You gotta plan ahead of time what you want to do and almost schedule it. I had looked up the IFE movies and made a list of what I wanted to watch, I had pre-downloaded movies on my phone, I had my sleep stuff all ready. So therefore I was sufficiently entertained by trying to sleep for two hours (did not succeed thanks to Demon Teething Toddler yowling and kicking the seat behind me and Loudly Talking Chatty Lady in the row next to Demon Toddler. Noise cancelling headphones could not completely overcome this combined racket), and I got to watch the new movies Rental Family (I love you Brendan Fraser!), The Anaconda, Wicked For Good, and then Godspell on my phone. Happy Easter!)
In flight meals were, strangely, not that great. Historically, ANA has some very good in-flight meals. I got the chicken with barbecue sauce with rice and succotash, Angie got the shrimp tempura (Angie: Which was pretty yummy! I liked my meal). We try our best to always get different meals, just in case there's an Airplane The Movie sort of situation. One of us has to be cognizant of the chaos, should it erupt.
Breakfast was equally medium. I got the Beef and Pork Meatballs with Penne, Angie skipped it because of tummy troubs (Angie: Luckily it was the usual tummy troubs. I just get so full of toots when you yeet me above 32,000 feet). I mostly got it for the potato salad, but the meatballs were pretty decent.
On to Narita! Customs was a long and wandering line. Most people had the foresight to fill out their customs declaration beforehand via the Visit Japan Web website. Those who didn't (or couldn't) were able to fill out a paper form. You know, a thing that you should have readily available at check in. Looking at you, United Airlines. You dweebs. (Angie: We also chatted with the guys in line behind us, who were, of course, from Cincinnati LOL. Two friends doing the usual Golden Route of Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, on their first trip to Japan. Hope they have fun!)
Because the itinerary was planned so thoroughly, we arrived with about an hour and a half to hang out at our gate. The domestic departures area at Narita is *diminutive* compared to even the domestic departures gates at CVG. There were like 7 total. A-G. That's it. This is one of the busiest airports in the world and there's only 7 gates for domestic transfers. Bananas. [This is 100% because they have a robust rail network and that like 1/3 people in Japan live in the Tokyo area. That'd be like if the population of NYC was 115 Million people, for context.]
Flight to Sapporo! It was fine. As is tradition, we both basically slept in 15 minute bursts, followed by a few minutes of wakefulness, followed by another micronap. We arrived early, the boarding and deplaning were done in like 5 minutes each. Very efficient. Five stars there. (Angie: Yup, it's always that last flight that I finally can sleep on a plane because it's been awake for 24+ hours and needs a forced reboot.)
Next, a train to the main station in Sapporo. 40 minutes of standing after nearly 24 hours of sitting was... not super great on our legs. But we did it. The air was *brisk* when we got to Sapporo (41f, compared to the 75f we left in Cincinnati, and the nearly 80f that it felt like all the planes we were on were kept at) (It was delightful and refreshing!). Then we walked to Solaria Nishitetsu Sapporo hotel. We're on the 14th floor, which means I will not be looking out the windows much. We grabbed some food from Lawson convenience store (shout out to the two readers of this that are old enough to remember when Lawson had locations [and their corporate headquarters] in Ohio) and returned to our room to relax and sleep.
There is a very nice view of a park and a Mystery Building. The beds are a bit firm, but I was able to get about 5 hours of sleep. The showers made up for any issues at all, though. Water pressure strong enough to flay the flesh from a cow and the controls let you take the temperature up to like 120f. Just what we needed.
We're off to get breakfast here in a little bit. And now, here's Angie to fill in the details that I invariably missed out on. (Angie's comments have been added, appropriately labeled, and bolded). Now off to start the day!
