Day 12: Travel Day
Nau mai
Yesterday we flew from Tokyo to Vancouver.
I really wanted to try the big, fluffy Japanese pancakes and I made it my mission for the morning. At 10:45am I was queued outside A Happy Pancake in Shibuya, waiting for my chance to scoff some of these delights into my mouth before rushing back to the hotel for lobby call. At 11am on the dot my name was called and I was shown to my solo dining table in the corner. I ordered the Happy Pancakes, three huge, fluffy, happy pancakes served with whipped Manuka honey butter and a bittersweet caramel sauce. They took fifteen minutes to come out and I put them away in a few seconds, an easy task given how light and airy the interiors were.
At midday we checked out of our hotel and loaded the gear into our final small bus. We said goodbye to Tokyo with a very nice drive along the elevated motorway, soaring above the port and gaining great views of Tokyo Bay.
We arrived at Narita Airport and loaded everything onto luggage carts. The luggage carts at Narita are extremely over engineered and feature rear wheel cowlings for drag reduction. Unfortunately they also feature a front bar that reduces the amount of cases you can stack on the bottom level so these are not our favourite luggage carts.
This is the big backpack, an essential part of our touring rig. It gets deployed when everyone has done so much shopping that they can’t fit it all in their suitcases.
Here Jon demonstrates how to safely transport your four track tape machine on an international flight.
This is the author desperately trying to catch up on my backlog of blog posts while we wait for the customs officer to bring back our carnet.
Congratulations to Jon for his point scored for a commitment to collecting all the old, rare tape machines.
