Last time, I mentioned that we were unable to fly out as expected last Tuesday because of the weather which gave us an extra few days in Canada. We almost didn't make our rescheduled flight either due to massive computer glitches at Pearson airport. We arrived at the airport early and found that all the self check-in kiosks were down and that there were massive line ups for all the desks. The Delta desk did not seem to have enough people, which is somewhat annoying because these glitches started hours before we got to the airport so that should have given them enough time to call in extra staff.
I got out my laptop and checked us in for our flight online while we waited in line, but we still had to get boarding passes and check our bags so we had to continue waiting. Eventually, they pulled the people for our flight out of the main line and into a secondary one because it was getting close to our boarding time. The guy dealing with this secondary line promptly disappeared for 20 minutes so we asked one of the other agents to help us. We then got our hand written boarding passes and headed for US customs and security.
We got through security at the time our flight was supposed to leave, but lucky for us they were still boarding our flight because they had to check all the boarding passes and documents by hand at the gate and everyone else was late too. Then when everyone was on the plane, they announced that the flight was overweight and they got some people to get off the plane, causing another delay.
In the end, we left for Detroit about 45 or 50 minutes after our expected departure time. This was concerning for us since our connection in Detroit was relatively tight (about an hour and 20 minutes), but we did make it to the next plane in time for the last call for boarding by running from one gate to the next.
Initially, on the flight to Japan daid and I were seated separately. However, an entire row was empty when we got on (I assume others had their own troubles with connecting flights) and one of the flight attendants suggested that daid could move there for additional leg room. So I moved there too.
Unfortunately, our new seats had screaming children on three
sides of them. One kid is usually not too bad because one kid can only
scream for so long. Three young children, however, is pretty awful
because they can all take turns screaming. This is exactly what they did. Also, one of
the sets of parents thought that their special little snowflake deserved
to have an iPad playing without earphones at top volume, which was
delightful.
The airline somehow forgot to transfer our meal preferences onto the new flight when they rescheduled us, which was pretty terrible. Not only did we have to pick around a really gross piece of chicken in one meal, but I'm pretty sure the vegetarian meals (and maybe all the specialty meals) are just better than the regular meals on airplanes. So instead of reasonably okay meals, we had the stereotypically bad airplane food. The only upside is that one of the meal options for the second meal on the flight was vegetarian anyway.
When we landed at Narita, we were told that our luggage had been left in Detroit. Luckily, Narita is an excellent airport so they're supposed to deliver our luggage to our apartment instead of having us go pick it up (they're also supposed to call us with status updates every day until it arrives). This makes up for our luggage missing the plane, since we basically crammed as much stuff in there as possible and now we don't have to take it on the train and carry it to our apartment from the station.
In the end, I think we might have had as much bad luck as we possibly could getting back here, but we finally made it.
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