Long time no post, but let’s see if I can get this race done tomorrow:
View Annapolis 10-Miler in a larger map
Time for bed, need to wake up early tomorrow to get ready. This’ll be interesting…
Update: Guess who finished? :) My “unofficial” time (using my Nike+) is 1:54:09… I’ll have to wait for the actual chip time to be posted to see how I did. My left leg is a bit sore but not as bad as it was before.
Oh. I haven’t told you about my left leg hurting me? Oops… I’ll have to fill you in on that later.
But anyway, I finished! I had to do this race since it starts and finishes right across the street from my house, and being able to come home and relax and shower and everything while the post-race festival is still going on is so nice. I’ll do a more detailed update once the results are in.
Well apparently I wasn’t able to keep this site updated with travel notes as I hoped that I’d be able to. Actually, traveling wore me out — it was all I could do after walking and exploring to crawl into bed at the end of each day. I’m starting to edit the 1700 or so photos I took during the trip, so hopefully soon I’ll have a few to upload here.
In other news, today I registered for the Annapolis 10 Mile Run at the end of August. I didn’t get a chance to do any running during my trip, but I think that with all the walking I did I still got my exercise. Tomorrow I’ll have to resume my running schedule.
P.S. – Safari 5 came out today, and from what I can tell so far, The Glenn Fitzpatrick Times loads perfectly fine. Hooray for HTML5! Maybe I’ll see what I can do to soup it up with CSS effects sometime.
We arrived at the airport about 15 minutes ahead of schedule, and after making a stop at the restroom by our jetway we went to passport control. I’m a bit disappointed since now instead of the cool rubber stamps with multi-colored ink that they used for my last trip here, they’ve now replaced them with not-as-cool (or even-cooler, depending how much you like tech gadgetry) printed adhesive stamps. These new stamps have the same details as the old rubber stamps, but they also now have a QR code as well.
It took only about 15 minutes to go through passport control, our luggage was already on the luggage carousel, and the customs inspection was a 3-second glance at my customs form and a quick wave through by a sanitation-masked customs officer.
We changed our money at the currency exchange and stopped to figure out how to get from the airport to the hotel. There are two ways to get to the hotel from the airport: either you can take a bus or a train, and both cost about the same (3000¥ vs. 3110¥), and both take a little more than an hour from start to finish. Since we could see the entrance to the train station at the airport from where we were sitting, we figured we might as well go that route.
A friendly station worker saw us standing in line at the self-service kiosk for purchasing train tickets, and she took us to where there were more self-serve kiosks and though the machine had an option for English display, she gave us step-by-step explanations in English how to purchase tickets. The next train was leaving in 10 minutes, and after a split-second of uncertainty since Carrie and I both had large and/or heavy luggage (“Ten minutes?? Where do we have to go to catch the train? Oh, just over there? Ah, okay.”) I bought the tickets for the next train departing. For some reason I had a thought in the back of my mind to purchase a receipt, and it’s a good thing that I did, too.
I showed my tickets to a lady working at a ticket gate and she fed them into the gate, and I retrieved mine at the opposite end of the ticket gate. Carrie showed her tickets to the lady and followed. We made it down to the train and after a quick run along the side as we tried to figure out which car we were in (we didn’t notice that we were in car #4 after we had already stowed our luggage in car #7), we made it to our designated seats in car #4, seats 1A and 1B, and sat down. At least, we assumed they had to be our designated seats since my ticket reservation said that I was in car #4 seat 1B, and Carrie had already lost her ticket. It seems that she didn’t notice that the tickets were to be retrieved at the opposite end of the ticket gate — the lady working the gate took her ticket and waved her through, and she figured that was all that needed to be done. I tried to deflect some of the blame by saying “we” made a blunder, but she saw it and said that it was her blunder, and we sat there for our train ride and hoped that nobody would come along to collect tickets.
We felt jetlagged — more like a travel hangover, actually — and tried to rest a bit to calm our nerves. We had a brief scare when a man who looked like he collected tickets walked past us toward the front of the train with something that looked like a portable ticket-machine, but thankfully it seems that nobody collects tickets on this train. At least, not today, on this particular train.
Our only issue with the lost ticket was wondering how we would be able to leave the station with only one ticket between us. We saw the exit faregates and had to stop and think of what to do for a brief moment, but then we saw the information office next to the faregates, so we went in there and explained our issue to the girl behind the counter and showed her my ticket, my reservation, and the receipt I requested when buying the tickets, and she had a supervisor come out and she explained our issue to him in Japanese and he waved us through. Crisis averted! That was enough adventure for us for one day.
Our hotel is directly across the street from the train station, only a 2 minute walk from exiting the station and through a small shopping arcade. We checked in, made it to our room on the 30th floor, and since Carrie had a sore back from sitting on the plane and a headache from traveling, she took some Excedrin and lay down for a nap while I took a shower to get the grime of travel off of me before I took a quick nap as well. We figured we’d nap for about 30-40 minutes (until 6 PM) and then we’d venture out to find something for dinner. Well, the alarm went off at 6, and I think we figured that we needed more rest so we set another alarm for 7 but the next thing I knew was that it was 11 PM and I couldn’t remember the second alarm going off. At that point it was just time to stay in and sleep off the jet lag, and make a fresh start in the morning. I had weird dreams, though… something about our hotel room being part of an aquarium (maybe because this hotel has an aquarium attached to it?), and everybody wanted to come over to party in our room, and even John Tesh showed up and needed a place to stay, and since he’s a fellow fraternity brother of mine I was only happy to oblige him with a spot to crash.
12:30 PM EST / 1:30 AM Tokyo, 750 miles into the flight -
Mealtime. Codfish with rice and salad and a buttered roll and cookies. And REAL SILVERWARE. I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever had actual non-plastic utensils on a flight. It’s possible that I’ve never had real silverware and have only used plastic.
The flight attendants are telling people to stay in school or else you’ll end up as a flight attendant.
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2:15 PM EST / 3:15 AM Tokyo, 1500 miles into the flight, somewhere over Manitoba -
You’re not supposed to smoke in the bathroom on an airplane… so why does it have an ashtray? Maybe if you started to smoke and forgot and needed somewhere to extinguish your cigarette? But then why is there another ashtray on the outside of the lavatory door, too?
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5:00 PM EST / 6:00 AM Tokyo, somewhere over the Yukon -
I just woke up from a 3 hour nap, and I probably only slept on the plane for about an hour more than that. I think I’m just going to stay awake for the remaining 7 hours 30 minutes of the flight to pretend that I just woke up at 6 AM and see how that might help me cope with jet lag.
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6:40 PM EST / 7:42 AM Tokyo, 3800 miles into the flight -
I watched the movie “CQ” on my iPad; I’d seen it before, but it’s got to be one of my most favorite movies. At one part, the main character’s father showed up at an airport for a layover, and had to be helped off the plane since he had lost his glasses during the flight, and explains his need for assistance further by saying “I took a sleeping pill and ate all the ice cream.”
I didn’t think that they still served ice cream on airplanes until they came by with our “breakfast” (I say breakfast since it’s 7:50 AM at the destination): Turkey hot dogs and Häagen-Dazs ice cream!
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8:20 PM EST / 9:20 AM Tokyo, crossing the international date line -
Carrie’s in flight entertainment system froze up early on the trip, so she tried to sleep and tried to watch movies over the shoulder of the passenger in front of her. We just had the attendant reset her system; apparently it runs Linux.
August 29, 2010 · No Comments