I’ve arrived safely and without incident in Narita. This airport looks nothing like it did when we left in 1998. Literally everything has been redone. There is a new lounge and it has WIRELESS! It’s just a little after 5 p.m. here, which is about 2 a.m. there in Pocatello.

The wireless costs 500 yen for a day. Not a bad price considering what most other places arer charging. My flight to Manila starts boarding in about an hour and leaves in about two hours. Some of the rice fields were flooded and I took quite a few pictures out the window. I may even have a picture of Mt. Tsukuba. Definitely have Tsuchiura. It smells the same here, however. There’s no mistaking the odor of Japan when you walk up the jetway. There are quite a few people here in the lounge. There are flights to Bangkok, Shanghai, Manila, Hong Kong, and Singapore in the next couple of hours.

The airplane over here was a 747 and Northwest has upgraded their airplanes a bit. Business Class is larger than just the front part of the airplane. It now extends back several more rows into were Economy was before. The food was reasonably good. Dinner took a long time to get served. Breakfast was served about 90 minutes before we landed. We were at the gate about 4:15 local time which was about a half-hour early as I recall. My iPod ran out of battery a couple of hours before we landed. I was glad I had my minidisk player with me. There was no power on the plane for laptops where I was seated. Only in the up-front area and upstairs in First Class. “Soon,” the flight attendant told me. I was not in the front part of the airplane. Business class was full. First class had room for 8 and had 3 people. I didn’t look at Economy, so I don’t know how many people were back there. We had a lot of turbulence coming across — more than three hours in one stretch.

We went north out of LAX up to just north of San Francisco and then went out over the ocean. We continued way north, however, along the same track that I would have expected we would fly out of Seattle. It is very quiet here in the lounge so I expect most people have come in from the US and are making connections. Lots of folks are snoozing.

It’s quite clear outside and about 50 degrees. It is very green, just as we would expect. It makes me a bit “homesick” as this is one of the beautiful times of the year in Japan. Oh well. I guess looking out the window will have to do for this trip!