The End of the Trip (and what happened after)

It's been a busy week. I'm in America now, so I'm no longer abroad and therefore the blog will be going dormant. Until next time. but first let's wrap up our little tale.


We slept all day on the 26th, and then sort of slept again that night in preparation for the morning. I slept maybe three hours. We took some trains to the airport and checked into our flight. We departed from Tokyo to Taipei, where we landed and would remain for about 5 hours until our next flight.

During that time, I left the airport (got a Taiwan passport stamp, haha) in order to check my bag at the check-in counter because I  had impulsively bought some Japanese liquor (a gift for friends later) at the duty free place in Tokyo and that wasn't gonna fly transferring to another plane.

So after all that and a lot of waiting, we board our long flight. Taipei to LAX.

In the course of these two flights I watched something like 5 onboard films. I did not sleep. My theory was that if I was insanely tired by the time I got to my final destination, I'd be able to fall asleep at a reasonable time and avoid the terrors of jetlag.

In LAX we hurried to escape the customs and immigration, but I swear it was harder for me to get intomy own damn country than to travel into any foreign one, including places like Vietnam that don't have automatic visas for US travelers. We waited in line to use a automated terminal to scan our passport and get some kind of ticket. Then waited in line to have an agent look at our documents and stamp us, then waited in line to walk past a customs agent, show my passport again and say "I have nothing to declare."

Anyway, I had  a connecting flight from LAX to Kansas City on Southwest, so I walked to the terminal...because evidently LAX doesn't have any sort of tram or any convenient transport between terminals? Idk if I'm missing something there, but it was a bit of a walk in the hot sun.

Anyway, my final flight took me across America, and I did sleep on this one. I could not resist the pull, and southwest doesn't really give you much else to do on their flights.

I landed and got my bag and my friends and some food. It was after midnight by the time I landed on a couch and fell asleep.

And then I slept, and I'm being completely sincere when I say this (this was one of the most baffling experiences of my life, perhaps) but other than one or two times I woke up and pet a cat for aminute, I slept pretty much straight through the night...and then the morning...and then the afternoon. And when I read my phone's clock upon finally rising it read "16:30."

At first I thought it was an error, but nope. I simply slept for about 15 hours straight.

The next morning (I woke up at the other 4:30...the AM one...) and we left KC, headed up to Indianapolis. I'm at GenCon now drinkin' and playing board games.

So that's that. Back in America. Maybe not back home exactly, but where is home really? Where the heart is?

But also, that's it's literal question I'm asking myself because I might not go back to live in the Bay and I should probably figure out where I am going to live when I stop being a drifter (which is my current answer when people ask me what I do or where I live...drifter...like a sexier word for unemployed transient, because it implies that I'm doing it on purpose).

Er, so that was Asia, excluding all the parts I forgot or left out on purpose (whether for laziness, tastefulness, or discretion...for instance: I didn't want to give too much detail describing my gastrointestinal health, despite it playing a major role in the narrative arc of my journey.)

I'm absolutely rambling at this point, so I'm just going to end unceremoniously.