A 5am wake up call is never fun – except when you wake up knowing that you’re about to fly half-way round the world!

We both pretty much bounded out of bed, finished packing up the odds and ends of our belongings, loaded up the car and headed straight to McDonalds for breakfast (Shhh! Don’t tell my dietitian! lol!!).  It was a gorgeous day in Houston, the sun was shining the roads were quiet – with the exception of a rather large accident on the 59.

There was a 40 ft truck – which I think was full of potatoes – that was stopped.  The back door was wide open, the cargo was all over the road and the trailer had been on fire but the nearby fire truck had put it out.  (This was much to Col’s dismay as he wanted breakfast baked potatoes – or some such poor joke at such an early hour of the day!)

We got to the Parking Spot car park, which was supposed to be auto-admittance.  You pull up, you take a ticket and you drive.  However, we had some flailing woman come screaming out of the little hut for us, as we drove past, to tell us where to park.  Total stupidity – and self automated my pink Irish arse by the way!

We got to the airport, went to drop our bags at bag drop – and, for a glorious 30 seconds thought that our Silver Elite status hadn’t elapsed.  Unfortunately though, it had and it took forever to change our bags from 4 bags to 2 bags (we over-booked, just in case!)

Starbucks was way busy than security for a change.  We pretty much dandered through and got in a long queue for a hot breakfast drink – which we barely got to drink before it was time to board.

Once aboard, the Pilot had some kind of error light and they had to hold us for a half hour while they got some engineers in to check out the ‘mechanical problem’ before we were cleared to take-off.

Not long after take-off, I got a killer nosebleed that hit me like a ton of bricks.  The air steward was seriously friendly and helpful – he brought me a box of tissues, made sure I was doing the right things to stop it and checked up on me later in the flight to make sure I was ok.

No idea where it came from, but it was a royal pain in the rear! This wasn’t helped by the fact that my wonderful hubby up-ended his full cup of apple juice all over me – meaning I had to change my trousers, just after my nosebleed so you can imagine how thrilled I was.

During the flight, I watched  6 films, yes, SIX.  I watched Cars (on the recommendation of one Mr Paul McKee), All About Steve, The Back-up Plan, How do you Know?, Julie and Julia, Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging.  Some were good, some not so good, but my favourite, by far was Cars! lol!
Col watched 5, he too, watched Cars (and loved it!), Quantum of Solace (for the millionth time!), he started Hot Tub Time Machine – thought it sucked, Little Fockers, This is It and Music and Lyrics.

I slept for about an hour, before I knitted 1.5 inches of sock, frogged it, started over, abandoning the pattern and managed to almost finish the sock.  I walked up and down the plane a number of times times – fearful of getting DVT or having my back go out on me like it did in Amsterdam last year.

An hour or so before we landed the air steward (who helped me with my nosebleed) came around and gave us a couple of 200ml bottles of champers – to make early morning mimosas with and enjoy with our breakfasts.  Definitely a nice touch and we managed to split the first bottle.

The second, I tried to take through on to the plane to Tokyo, but I had to abandon it going through security *sad face*

The descent to Tokyo took FOREVER and was pretty shaky, we landed at 2.40pm Tokyo time (which was 12.40am Texas time).  We found our gate pretty quickly, I ran off for a quick freshen up and wardrobe change, while Col went to try and get our seat allocations changed – as they’d got us sitting away from each other.

Flight no.2 from Tokyo to Singapore was ok, it was a lot more cramped (smaller plane) and neither of us slept much.  Col was pretty tired and almost delirious which was so unlike him – he’s normally the composed one and i’m the crazy, exhausted and whiny one! LOL!

We arrived on time, 11.30pm, immigration SUCKED, we picked up our bags and took a seriously expensive late-night taxi to our hotel where we checked in, hopped on-line to decompress and crashed in bed around 2am.

It was a long, long day, but everything went to plan, car park, bags were under weight limit (though Col’s point of concern was the following day between Singapore and Malaysia!) and we’d managed to get ourselves to Singapore in two very, very tired pieces!

*For the record the Jump was Houston to Japan, the Skip is Japan to Singapore and the hop was Singapore to Malaysia!