Whew – I made it into the Marriott Courtyard here at Tokyo Station. The flight on All Nippon Airlines was uneventful*, as was the express train ride into the city.
After that, I had to work a little to make my way to the hotel with all my luggage. The express train platform is five floors down from street level, deep under the sprawling Tokyo Station complex.
*I forgot to take my large camera out of my big bag as I checked it in. So I fretted that the camera might get damaged by the baggage handling process, or frozen while in the cargo hold .. but it seems to have survived just fine.
Our flight path had us skirt Juneau and Anchorage to their south, fly north over the Aleutian Islands, and over the Kamchatka Peninsula (part of the Russian Far East). Here is the view from the window, just as we started crossing over Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands.We are just pulling into the gate at Narita’s Terminal 1, next to an aircraft that looks like ours. It was cloudy, rainy and 46 °F/ 8 °C. Tokyo’s latitude of 35° is a little further south on the globe than Seattle’s 47°.Here’s a billboard with the Narita Express train that I took into the city. JR stands for Japan Rail and not for John Ross (the villain in ‘Dallas’). The beautiful red-brick Tokyo Station building is where I ended up from the airport. The original Station building was completed in 1914. Lately it underwent a 5½-year renovation, and reopened in 2012, restored inside and out.
