And as usual we are prepared for our vacation a couple of weeks before departure and the only thing we needed to do is packing our suitcases. The plan was to start on friday evening after work but this was shifted to saturday morning, on saturday morning we delayed it until saturday afternoon and finally we started packing sunday late afternoon.

Did you really read a ‘we’ in this part of the trip? Yes you did read that, this was probably the first time that I did most of the packing myself… Early in the evening our suitcase were finished except for the some smaller things.

Monday morning we woke up from the alarm-clock and 1,5 hour later we left our house towards Nürnberg Airport where our first flight took of at exactly 10:25 but the start got aborted. For a moment we thought the plane had technical problems but 10 minutes later the pilot told he need to abort take-off because another plane was landing, a bit strange but at the world-famous and busy airport of Nürnberg such thing can happen. Only 5 minutes later we were in the air on our way to Paris.

In Paris we had a very good experience at the airport, the queuing for our flight to Tokyo went well and you could already feel the Japanese influence. There were no arguments, no pushing, no queue jumping, no stress, … With 30 minutes delay we left Paris together with Air France in A380-800 towards Narita Airport (about 80 km. from Tokyo). The flight was long but excellent with the standard glass of Champagne and the meals we preordered Danielle went for the ‘ocean meal’ and I went for ‘italian’. Although we started later as planned we landed almost on time. After a really fast border control, we lost a bit of time while waiting for our suitcases but in the end we left the airport within 1 hour from landing.

After we came to the border control we walked towards the JR East Travel Service Center to get a special combination for a round-trip with the Narita Airport Express (NEX) including a Suica prepaid card. The NEX is a train line which brings people from the Airpot directly into Tokyo and some surrounding areas and the Suica card can be charged at every station and makes it possible to pay contact free. But before we came to the Service Center we needed to catch a couple of escalators and this was actually a quite funny experience since after a couple of moments a line was behind us since people where lining behind us because we were both standing on the wrong side of the escalator. In Japan the people stay on the left side and walk on the right side which they also do whiteout questioning it.

Before we left Narita we had a coffee at the Starbucks to wait for the 11:14 (local Japanese  time). After finishing our coffee we walk towards platform 1 where we boarded for a 68 minutes train ride towards Shinagawa Station. After our arrival we walked straight to our hotel and after checking we only had to wait 25 minutes before our room was ready. We stay at the 27th floor, get every day 2 new bottles of water, had fruit on arrival and on top of that we got upgrade towards a Premium King. During the wait for our room keys we also got our mail which contained the train tickets and also very important the Mobile Hotspot from a local provider.

In less than an hour we took a shower, changed clothes and left for Tokyo DisneyLand for the 2nd part of our 32 hour-long day.