Getting to the airport was a series of bad jokes for me. The first was in getting to the airport. The night before checkout, I reserved a charter bus from the hotel that left for the airport at 7:30AM for what was to be an hour long bus ride. In the five minutes it took for me to check out of my hotel at 6:45 AM, my maps app kept increasing the time estimate to the airport from to 1:15, 1:30, then 1:45. I decided to skip the charter bus and take an express train to the airport. This provided a more consistent arrival time, but I would have to deal with my luggage through the train station.
At the train station, even though I thought I had somewhat mastered finding the correct train line, I did make a minor mistake and was heading the wrong direction to my train. I noticed the error after walking over 400 meters the wrong way (there are distance markers in the station), but made it to my train just as it was boarding.
In the rush to board the train, I misread my ticket and boarded car 5 looking for seat 9 instead of car 9 seat 5. Since seating was reserved, I almost told a sleeping person they were in the wrong seat before I realized my error. Fortunately there were open seats in my incorrect train car.
The last bad joke was in restocking my coworkers with our favorite cookies from Japan – Ishiya Shiroi Koibito Cookies. We discovered these years ago when they were brought to us by a coworker as a gift and everyone become addicted to them. It is now tradition for anyone going to or visiting from Tokyo “restocks” our team. A year ago I had a short layover in Tokyo and they were only available at one store near gate 82 of Terminal 2, which was the opposite direction of my gate. I had just enough time so I made the walk and grabbed two of the largest cases. As I made my way to my gate, I noticed the gift shop right next to my gate had a same selection of Ishiya cookies. I guess the bright side is that I got to circulate the blood in my legs a bit more before sitting down for an 11 hour flight.