Hello, U.S.A.

After three days of traveling, we made it back to the U.S.A! It was very nice to finally be able to walk through the "local" line at the airport and not the foreigner line. Ahh, it is good to be home, where we can drink the tap water and everyone knows not to stand on the toilet.

We had a harrowing journey home as we flew right into the middle of chaos at the Tokyo Narita airport, where hours earlier a fed ex cargo plane crashed killing two people. Utter, utter and complete chaos. The airport was officially closed for 24 hours, but somehow, our flight from bangkok was still sent to tokyo, where we were stranded for hours with no plan and no information. Staff were obviously not prepared for an emergency. They finally bussed us to a five star luxury hotel ($600 plus a night) with no information about when our flight would leave, when or if they would pick us up again, or even who was paying the bill.

When our flight finally left 24 hours after it was scheduled, it was only 60% full even though it was one of the first flights out, and even though there were obviously many people who should have been on the flight who were still waiting in lines at the terminal. The situation was very poorly handled. We were sent to tokyo after they knew about the "incident", and even though the major runway was closed. Our plane coming in had to use a smaller landing strip to get in, but our larger plane to MSP could not get out. Why Northwest routed us to tokyo even though the airport was closed and then proceeded to put us in a luxury hotel with a steak dinner and 5* buffet breakfast is totally beyond me. This must have cost them a bundle, and could have been prevented by *not* flying us into the closed airport. Hello? Is this crazy or what?

Needless to say, we are happy to be home and also delirious from lack of sleep, but trying to stay awake a few more hours so we are not *totally* screwed up.