My Trip Home

Monday, July 5, 2010 at 9:18pm

The trip home was not something that I was looking forward to mostly because I was leaving my new friends.

My day started at 3 am, dilated and then got ready to go, had one last person to say goodbye to before Danny would be there to take me to the airport.

I knew it was going to be a long day on the way to the airport because I was already hurting, we arrived at the airport on time, Danny loaded the bags on a cart and we went to the JAL ticket window, I had already called 2 days before to confirm the flight and make the wheelchair request, the only thing the lady asked me was why I needed a wheelchair, I just said surgery, didn't have to show the doctors letter, So I said goodbye to Danny and sat down to wait for my wheelchair, the wheelchair was something hard for me to do, everybody looks at you more, I just looked straight ahead and tried not to look at anybody in the eye.

The wheelchair service was really nice, all the people were nice too, one of the best parts was that I did not have to know where I was going, they all knew the way of course and the other part was that we jumped all the lines, the security check points were different too, I got wheeled through two of them and got patted down on the other side, at LA they asked if I could walk through which I did, the only bad thing about the wheelchair was that it made me sit down for more hours, I think the whole trip took about 20 hours.

The first plane ride to Japan on JAL was nice, the flight attendants on JAL even carried my bags aboard for me, not like when I walked aboard the American Airlines flight, being the first on the plane I saw the flight attendants looking at magazines in the back, not that I needed the help but it just show the difference, I will chose a foreign airline when ever I can for any flights in the future.
They changed the seats for me on the plane from Japan to Dallas, they moved me to the first row of the cattle car section because of more leg room, that was nice at least, the only trouble with that is it is also the row where they put the baby's which there were three of, they screamed for 3/4's of the 11 hour flight so no sleeping for me, the good part of that was that the row in front of us was the back row of business section, these guys paid a lot more for the seats but still had to listen to the kids, it did make me smile. The seat I had looked straight the aisle so I watched how the other half live, business class sure drinks a lot.

When we were about an hour from landing the pilot came over the intercom and told us that about half way through the flight there was a mechanical problem with the plane which caused them to fly at a lower altitude and that made the plane use more fuel so we did not have enough fuel to reach Dallas and that we were going to land at LA instead, that worked out good for me because I was able to get a flight direct to Las Vegas which put me in there two hours earlier, if I had not changed flights they would have sent me to Dallas to catch my plane back to Vegas.

That was my trip home, hard but what choice was there, I would do it again in a heart beat for the most wonderful experience I have ever had.