It’s Sunday April twenty sixth, and I am sitting at the airport waiting for my flight to take off.  I’m headed to Japan again.  The last couple times I was in Japan, I wrote in the blog, and I think I will again. I have three friends that left a few days ago and are already there.  It will be fun to meet up with them and travel with them.

I bought new travel clothes before this trip.  I’ve never had “travel clothes” before.  Usually I just wear jeans, a t-shirt and a hoodie. I think a well fitting pair of jeans are comfortable, a t-shirt is comfortable if it’s too warm and the hoodie is essential if it’s cool. But I bought a matching pair of pants, tank top and long sleeve duster.  It doesn’t hide the belly as much as I’d like, but it’s supposed to be wrinkle proof and it’s fairly comfortable. 

For this trip, I am also trying a supplement kit and a tens unit that are both supposed to combat jet lag.  The supplement kit comes with supplements to fight inflammation and to help reset your circadian rhythm.  It also comes with blue light glasses and an app that tells you when to do what.  We went to Denver last night because there was talk of possible snow and if you have a morning flight, it is often easier to go down the night before and get a hotel than to mess with getting up 5 hours early and hoping traffic or weather doesn’t mess up your plans.  The jet lag app told me to go to sleep at 11:00, but I was tired at 9:00.  I forced myself to stay up, watching tv shows I didn’t really want to watch on the hotel room tv.  I spent a large portion of the night awake as I often do when not in my own bed.  Why do hotel rooms have so many lights?  People are here to sleep. 

I got up at 7:35am as my app told me to do.  I looked at my sleep data that my watch recorded.  I got a sleep score of 72.  That seems decent, but it didn’t feel decent.  It looked like I was awake most of the night from about 2:00am to 4:30am.  How is that not a lower sleep score?  Oh well, nothing to do about it now.

I put on my orange glasses that block out the blue light. I don’t quite understand that science.  I took my morning supplements and we headed out for breakfast.  When I got my coffee, I looked at the array of sugars and was instantly disappointed that there were no yellow packets.  I mentioned this and Richard looked at me like I was dumb.  They are right there.  Oh, yea, yellow glasses made the packets look white.  Then when I got my over medium eggs, I cut into the yolks and watched this off-white liquid run out.  Something’s wrong with my eggs.  That is not the color of eggs.  It had only been about 5 minutes since I couldn’t find the yellow sugar, but I had already forgotten about the glasses.  I took off my glasses and noticed the liquid was yellow.

After breakfast, Richard dropped me at the airport.  Have I mentioned before that I have a wonderful husband?  He didn’t have to take all this time to take me to the airport.  I took up half his day yesterday and will take up half of his day today. 

I found a bag tag kiosk and tried to print my bag tags.  It told me to go to the light blue area. I didn’t know what that meant and because of the glasses everything was red.  Nothing was blue.  I saw a different kiosk area and just decided to try that.  It was the right one.  Bags tagged and put on the belt in less than 5 minutes.

The pre-check line was longer than the other lines as usual – it kind of defeats the point of pre-check.  But, the lines moved fast – never stood still once.  While in line, I got 2 compliments on my cool glasses.  Huh, didn’t know being color blind with clip on orange glasses was fashionable.  The new-ish bag scanning equipment DIA has is slick and quick.  While I was waiting for my carry-ons to come out, the woman behind me commented that she loved my look, especially my outfit.  We chatted about where I was going.  She lived in Japan for a few years and was jealous I was going there.  She had loved living there. 

I arrived at my gate at 9:30am which was my goal time to get to the airport to begin with.  I got two more comments on my glasses in that short amount of time.  There was no line at the gate attendant so I went up and checked if there were any seats I could upgrade to.  There was and I could use miles to reduce the price.  I tried that yesterday and the website would only let me use money or miles, not both.  Great!  Now I look like I’m special and I will be sitting like I am special.  I also can go wait in the United lounge.  Even though the lounge is nothing spectacular, I think I am officially winning the airport!