We spent our last day in Bangkok lounging around the U Sathorn hotel. My cold was getting worse, so I didn’t really feel like doing much other than napping. I did venture out in search of some decongestants. That turned out to be harder than I thought: Sudafed is not available, at least not over the counter. (Meth heads ruin everything.) I did find a pharmacy a couple of blocks away where they sold me a decongestant nose spray, but I can’t really say whether it had any effect.

The Party Van took us to the airport just as the sun was going down, and we said our farewells and then made our way through the concourses to our departure gate. We did get some Korean-style fried chicken in the airport and boarded the flight to Japan. That trip lasted about six hours. I had hoped to sleep through it but I don’t think I did more than doze for an hour or so.

We landed at Haneda Airport, which is closer to the center of Tokyo than Narita Airport, at about 4:00 a.m. local time. Our flight to Dallas didn’t depart until late afternoon, so after passing through Japanese customs and passport control, we were in one of the world’s great cities on a lovely day with eight hours to amuse ourselves. And I couldn’t stop sneezing. I dug out a K95 mask which I had been carrying around since 2021 and put it on. It didn’t do me any good but at least I wasn’t dripping all over Tokyo. At the airport we turned all our remaining Thai baht into Japanese yen, which looked like enough for a day out.

There’s a monorail from Haneda into downtown Tokyo, and we got some breakfast and then strolled over to the Imperial gardens and waited for the gates to open at 8:00 a.m. We noticed that a lot of the plantings seemed to have been overhauled by the Emperor Emeritus Akihito. He was a working scientist as crown prince, and after reigning as Emperor for 28 years he stepped down. But a lot of the garden exhibits had been redone during his reign to be more educational: displays of what would have been growing in the gardens during the Edo period, a grove of every species of bamboo, and so forth.

After a walk through the garden — punctuated by frequent stops to sit down and rest — we went over to the famous Ginza shopping district. Dr. Kelly had noted some shops she wanted to visit, hoping to find some Japanese artworks within our budget range. We did pass by the most ridiculously Japanese site in Tokyo: a plaza by the Toho theater featuring a bronze statue of a national hero.

We interrupted our shopping expedition with a stop at a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant, where we happily stuffed ourselves with fishy treats. Figuring out how the whole place worked was a little tricky, as there were some non-intuitive aspects. I didn’t expect a tea faucet at the table, for instance.

After lunch we did a little more shopping, and bought some things at a wonderful little upstairs shop on a side street, selling ceramics and textiles by Tokyo artists and artisans. By that point I was plodding along like a zombie so we rode the monorail back to the airport and found our departure gate, and rested while we waited to board our plane.

The flight took us to Dallas-Fort Worth airport (guess which airline we were on), and since we were moving in the same direction as the Earth’s rotation, the whole trip took place during one very long day. On the ground in Texas we had some barbecue and moved up and down the concourse as the airline kept moving our flight’s gate around. Eventually they settled on a gate and we got on the plane to Connecticut, where our ride to Deerfield was waiting. And there our journey ends.

And then it snowed.

Next time: final thoughts.