3 posts tagged with "Travel"

The Plan​

Before the start of the 2016 college football season, two good friends and I decided to make an epic pilgrimage for the opening weekend. While most games are played on Saturdays, it just so happened that our alma maters played on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Labor Day weekend. The three of us all lived in Oklahoma at the time, so we began planning the logistics to see if it would even be physically possible to be at each stadium by kickoff. The matches were Kansas State at Stanford in Palo Alto, California (for Chris), UCLA at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas (for Callen), and Notre Dame at Texas in Austin, Texas (for me). Despite requiring about 4,500 miles of total travel, we determined that it would be possible to see all the games barring any sort of delays. We took a gamble, and this is how it all played out.

April 30th, 2016 - 電車の風 - Tokyo​

As expected, Kaylee and I arrived at Narita Airport in Japan extremely jet-lagged. Even though I was lucky enough to have only one connecting flight in Chicago, the 18 or so hours of travel and 14-hour time difference took their toll on me both mentally and physically.

Kyle, my close friend from college who lives in Tokyo, greeted us right outside of customs after we landed. We exchanged our「お久しぶりですね」 greetings and headed towards the train station. It never ceases to amaze me how Kyle and I are always able to just pick up where we left off. Even though I hadn’t seen him in over a year, it felt like our conversation only had a momentary pause. The dumb running jokes and philosophical life conversations seem to run forever in a loop like the train that we were about to board.

It feels strange waking up in the Lower 48 again. When I left Alaska, the sunlight was already making people and plants manic again. The grass that was dead for months bloomed vivaciously in a matter of days. The snow was long gone, but the rain hadn’t shown itself quite yet. The midnight sun was already creeping and beaming over me.