The Return Trip Part 1

When Mrs. Stoklosa first brought up blogs and told us to write about something that interested us the first thing that popped into my mind was planes.  My second thought was the story of the hellish return trip that involved five flights, four countries and over fifty hours of consciousness.  In fact I didn't sleep until we were in the car driving back towards Weston.

In this post I will be setting up for the following threads.  It all started in Hong Kong International airport where we were trying to catch a flight back home.  The goal was to be able to catch a flight directly from Hong Kong to the mainland but due to the humid, hot weather that makes up Hong Kong, flights were being weight restricted which means that they were having to bump paying passengers off the flights and move them to other flights.  As a stand by passenger this is the worst news you could possibly hear.  We stood and waited as names for more senior stand by crews were called but alas ours was not.  My dad got on the computer and looked for a way for us to get to Tokyo where the flight loads were more manageable to get on.  The way we were going to do this was to catch an overnight flight to Singapore, sleep in the airport and then catch the first flight to Tokyo the next morning.  Due to the extremely low loads on the Hong Kong- Singapore flight we managed to snag upper deck business class seats for the three hour hop to Singapore.  This flight represented a number of firsts for me such as  first time on a 747, first time on the upper deck and first time sitting in business class.