Hawaii to Hokkaido

I'd heard from several friends and relatives how amazed they were with snow and ice sculptures they'd seen in Hokkaido, Japan and Harbin, China. So what the heck! We decided we could give it a try. We've lived in Chicago for 35 years before moving back to Hawaii in 2008. We've experienced cold weather. Buuut... that was 18 years ago! My blood has thinned out.

When I told our daughter, Tiffany about this plan, she gave me a pair of spare snow boots that our granddaughter had barely used. She also loaned me 2 sets of thermal undergarments. And yes, I still had three winter coats, a rather homely yarn hat, scarves and gloves. She also sent us hand warmers. I'd never even heard of hand warmers before.

And then Linda from Kansas had commented that these were wonderful to survive the freezing cold.

Wellll... now I was getting worried. How cold is it going to be? Art warned that I was only used to going from car to house in winter. I told him I've shoveled snow. He reminded me that was decades ago.

UH oh... 

OK...

So I packed a lot of clothes for layering... then the boots.... two different kinds of winter coats... omiyage (gifts for relatives in Sendai and Tokyo) and suddenly we had our luggage and extra totes stuffed to the gills. I won't even go into Art's big boots, etc.

Anyway...

Would you believe we did not get into the right line at the airport check in? After waiting forever in line, they told us we should have gone into the precheck line. 🙄

They asked if I had a computer so I took out my iPad and put it in the bin.

Would you believe my Kindle and journal got flagged and we had another long wait?

We met up with our tour group and found Micah (Tohoku Travel escort) who we'd traveled with last year.

The flight was fine. We were on Japan Airlines. Granted we didn't love being at the bulkhead because you couldn't have your backpack accessible since it had to be stored overheard. But oh well... the seats had been assigned to us by the travel agency. We'll just have to be careful about stating our wishes next time.

We flew from Honolulu to Haneda, Japan and arrived at 4:04 PM but 9:04 PM in Hawaii. Haneda is the other large airport in Tokyo which is on the main island of Honshu. 

OK... We couldn't resist having our photo taken next to Godzilla at Haneda. 

Since we had a bit of a wait there, we also took the opportunity to mail our two boxes to my aunt and cousin in Tokyo and Sendai. That was super helpful and reasonable! They both received the boxes the following morning which is amazing!

From Haneda we had to catch a short flight to Chitose in Hokkaido which is the northernmost island of Japan.

We noted the Japan time when we arrived in Chitose and boarded our tour bus which took us to our hotel. It was called Ana Crowne Plaza Hotel Chitose.

We knew from our schedule that we now needed to pack these two small "blue bags" for a one night stay because we would only be at the next hotel for one night. Our big suitcases would meet us on the following night.

By the time we packed our bags and organized ourselves and our brains, it was 12:30 AM (Japan time).

Arrrghhh...

I took a melatonin and hoped I would get some sleep and not be on Hawaii time.

And this was our first day.