"I'll be Home for Christmas..."

I’m living a holiday cliché.

I mean, I’m not yet stuck at the airport, surviving on chocolate bars and chips, sleeping on plastic benches, but I figure I’m getting pretty close to it.

Heather and I are due to fly out of Tokyo Narita for London Heathrow together just after 11:00 am on Thursday December 23^rd. As of Yesterday, Sunday December 19^th, London Heathrow was closed due to all the snow that has been dumped down on it. If this were a one-off, freak thing, I wouldn’t be so concerned, but seemingly the whole of England has been plunged into a snowy cold more reminiscent of Toronto or Hokkaido for several weeks now. It’s one of those places like Vancouver, where it rarely snows or gets too cold in the winter, so they’re not exactly prepared for it, and business will grind to a half when anything more than an inch or two falls and stays around on the ground.

But they’ve been getting feet of the stuff. One can imagine by how many orders of magnitude that had messed things up. Airport after airport in the UK had been closing, but—until Sunday—Heathrow had held out. Now they’re closed, and the Monday version of our same flight from Tokyo to London was cancelled. Here’s hoping that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday make it through without any hiccups.

All of this is further complicated by the fact that we have separate flights booked down to Tokyo and back, and those flights are a good two weeks apart from one another. We’ve got one night of accommodation booked on Wednesday night after our late flight in from Sapporo Chitose, but if we try to head to Narita at the crack of dawn on Thursday morning, only to discover our flight to Heathrow has been cancelled, we’ll be doubly stranded: unable to make it to London, and without a flight back up to Sapporo. Further, as we’re nothing if not organized, we’ve both already shipped part of our luggage (the part containing the majority of our clothes and all of our たのしい Christmas gifts) ahead to Tokyo Narita so we could just pick it up and jump on our plane.

So this is me, now finished my lessons before Christmas and with only one and a half days of volleyball at my high school before I attempt to head to Sapporo for my flight down to Tokyo. As I stare out the window at rainy, warm-ish weather more befitting of England, I polish the golden horshoe I’ve had lodged in my colon for most of my life and try to devise clandestine, druidic rituals to appease the weather gods and grant me and my lady safe passage through to her ancestral home come Thursday.

Wish us luck.