So I'm officially back on U.S. soil after a week in Japan. Meghan and I are sitting in the Houston airport with a pretty long layover as part of our epic 24-hour travel day back home.



I figured while I'm stuck in the airport, I'd start writing up some trip recaps. I took so many photos on this trip and I want to document everything, so I'm going to break the posts up by day, otherwise this recap would be miles and miles long.

This first post is going to capture my travel day and first day in Japan.

This trip was actually a pretty last minute thing for us. We booked our plane tickets at the very end of February for an early April trip. Our friend Scott had moved to Tokyo about 15 months ago and we'd been monitoring ticket prices ever since. When we found a silly cheap deal ($650 round trip), we snapped them up right away.

Meghan and I left my house at 5 a.m. Wednesday morning for our flight from BWI to Denver.



United messed up the spelling of my name on my ticket, and when I called to get it corrected they told me I needed to get to the airport even earlier than normal for "additional screening." I don't even know what that ended up meaning, other than I had to check in at the ticket counter and I didn't get my normal TSA precheck on my ticket (which kind of sucked).

The flight from BWI to Denver was awful. So turbulent. Meghan was getting motion sick and I was just fairly sure we were going to die at any minute.

Obviously that didn't happen since I'm writing this post. Our flight from Denver to Tokyo was much smoother -- though we were delayed an hour because of "catering issues" -- but I definitely appreciated the lack of turbulence.

Twelve hours on a plane is a damn long time and for a while, the seat back TVs weren't working, which was not ideal.

While United tried to fix our TVs, I scoped out some pretty views of the Rockies.



And eventually saw the California coastline fade from view as we headed out over the Pacific.



Once the TVs were up and running, I settled in to some serious movie watching. I watched the Martian, the Danish Girl and Titanic (though I kind of dozed off and on during this one and didn't actually finish it before we landed).



Also, nom nomed some of this green tea gelato on the plane.



Meghan and I landed in Narita, Japan, navigated our way through customs and immigration and eventually found our way to the shuttle that would take us to Scott's apartment in Tokyo.

The shuttle ride was about two hours because traffic in Tokyo sucks real bad sometimes, but after 24 straight hours of travel, I have never been so excited to get off all forms of transportation and be at my "home" for the week.

After dropping our bags, stretching our legs and of course catching up with Scott, we ventured out in Roppongi (the area in Tokyo where he lives) and got some amazing ramen.



This might literally have been the most delicious meal I've ever eaten in my life. I'm not sure if it was because I was just so ridiculously tired or if it was because the food was literally that good, but oh my gosh, I basically just want to eat ramen all the time now.

After dinner and a short walk around, Meghan and I hardcore passed out.



And that officially wraps up my travel days and first day in Tokyo.

Up next: Our first full day in Tokyo where we explored more of Roppongi and all over Shinjuku.