Travel Plans

Here is a brief run down on our travel plans. In a later post I'll reveal Robin's secrets on how she got all our flights using frequent flyer miles when, in fact, we are not frequent flyers. But for now, here's the important stuff:

1. Saturday, March 26 - drive to Brooklyn, NY for an overnight stay.
2. Sunday, March 27 - depart from JFK airport for Tokyo, Japan.
3. Monday, March 28 - arrive at Narita Airport in Tokyo, then ride the train to Chiba to stay with my parents for a couple days.
4. Thursday, March 31 - depart from Narita airport for Seoul, South Korea. Arrive in Seoul a couple hours later.
5. Friday, April 1 - meet Gunner Jin face-to-face! Go back to our hotel (without him) an hour later. Hope we made a good first impression!
6. Monday, April 4 - day of "The Transfer." I don't know what else to call it. As far as we're concerned, this is the day Gunner is brought into our family, though technically we are only considered "temporary guardians" at this point.
7. Tuesday, April 5 - back on the plane, thanks for staying, hope you enjoyed South Korea, now get out! The Korean program does not want us loitering about in their country with our new baby. I will try to explain this when I better understand it myself.
8. Tuesday, April 5 - in a flight that seems to defy the space-time continuum, we arrive at JFK in New York only five minutes after leaving our connection in Tokyo. We hope to drive our family of five straight home from here.

Hanging out in Japan for a couple days while en route to Seoul may sound like poor planning given the recent seismic, tidal, and nuclear disasters that have struck the nation. We are not going into this casually. But it turns out all the available flights took us through Narita anyway. The option to acclimate to the new time zone in the company of my parents, who have been living in Japan for a year now and dearly miss their grandkids, is more appealing than that of hauling our two kids from one 14-hour flight onto another bound for Seoul without giving them a day or two outside the confines of an aerodynamic tin can. On the surface, it probably is a bad idea. In the deeper context of our family's growth, we hope it's a wonderful, memorable trip.