Japan Day 0

Multiple alarms — 04:15, 04:20, and 04:30 — were set for an early rise, and those were just mine. There was no way we were missing this flight.

It was dark, wet, and cold outside.

The M1 and M25 route to Heathrow was straightforward, and we made great time, arriving right on schedule at 06:00 to drop the car off.

We dropped the bags, cleared security, and in no time at all were ambling along the secret tunnels to the T5B lounge.

Once lounged in the lounge, sausages were clearly the best breakfast item — especially with toast and brown sauce.

Bored, I started making anime pictures via ChatGPT. They were pretty good. I did feel a little guilty using my ChatGPT subscription for something so trivial, so I asked it some more challenging questions — such as re-forecasting the weather for each day of our Japan trip and presenting the output as a table in a PDF.

In hindsight, BA007 to Tokyo was perhaps a little early in the morning for us, but catching a well-timed connection to Sapporo made it a necessary evil.

I used the Heathrow app, Flighty, and the lounge screens to confirm C61 as our gate. Boarding was surprisingly orderly — though that really shouldn’t have been a surprise, given where we were going.

Take-off was on time and we headed the traditional route towards Japan — over Europe, Turkey, the Stans, China, and finally into Japan. It appears our return on BA008 will head east from Japan, over Canada, Greenland, and Iceland — which technically makes this a RTW (Round-the-World) trip.

Thirteen hours plus before we land — let’s hope the in-flight entertainment, along with some food and wine, helps the time pass.