Our day started with a miscommunication so we missed the complimentary hotel breakfast. No worries. We took the local city bus to the Aeon Mall about 10 minutes away. Bus fare was $2.10. At the bus terminal we saw the sign for Aeon Mall was queue #6. Each bus has its own queue line. A pretty good line was already there for #6 when we arrived. We waited about 5 minutes and the pink Aeon bus arrived.

We completely filled up that bus! Barely any standing room left.

Aeon Mall had everything, including tons of restaurants. We ate in the food court, Greg in one direction and me in another. Greg went with a pork Ramen bowl with a drink ($14) and I got the Fried Rice with chicken & dumplings ($8.). Both were good & hit the spot.

We wandered through the 3 level mall - some interesting stores & merchandise including a supermarket, huge arcade and a cat cafe.  

We took the city bus back to the Welco Inn in Narita City to shuffle in a few purchases into our about-to-be checked luggage.

We had a little time so we decided to walk over to the Naritasan- Shinshoji Temple. It's about 8-10 blocks straight down from the hotel. Lots of people were out to visit the temple and peruse the many shops along the way. 

In the past from this hotel we have taken an airport shuttle or JR train to get to the Narita International Airport, today we are going on the Kensei private train/subway line. (Their station is a block opposite the JR station). Being Sunday the Keisei line has more frequent departure to Narita Airport so we thought we'd try it out.

As always, Narita International Airport had a ton of people going all over the world. It looked very chaotic but was pretty organized. Much more than previous visits a lot of services are now self-administered. We checked ourselves in at the kiosk, tagged and scanned our own checked luggage and sent it into the conveyor belt - there were agents available to assist but the traditional check in counters were no longer there. We did our own pre-immigration (taking our picture & scanning our passports) and the immigration agent only stamped our passports out as we went through. Our temperature was taken once or twice along the way.

Our flight departure out of Tokyo was delayed about an hour (maintenance issue they said, which instills such confidence! LOL) However due to a great tail wind we arrived earlier than the original scheduled time.

Our flight time today from Tokyo Narita to Vancouver is about 8 hours & 50 minutes (less time than the 10.5 hours to get there due to the rotation of the earth). It was scheduled to depart at 6pm local time (Sunday) or 3 am SK time (Sunday).

Again we had 2 or 3 beverage services, a snack service, a hot meal service and a box breakfast service. We sacrificed a little sleep time & watched a few movies.

All went smooth and quite quickly at Canada Customs & Immigration on entry. It really helps when there are SO many machines to accommodate the hundreds of people that come in on each flight.

We shuffled some stuff around in our suitcases (again) to accommodate some items we bought at Duty Free in Japan. After which we made the trek to the domestic end of Vancouver Airport to drop off our luggage for the flight home. We had more than enough time as we had 4.5 hour layover.

The 2 hour flight back to Saskatoon was pretty quiet. At this point we had been awake for just over 24 hours, so no surprise we had a nap enroute. It was winter again when we landed in Saskatoon:-(

Thanks to Bernie & Lisa for looking after our vehicle while we were gone. We had a quick visit then it was time for the last leg home. We stopped at Tim's in Stonebridge then drove home in a light snow storm. Cold temperatures forecasted for this week - just to remind us that it's still actively winter. 

Good to be home, even with the current weather! Thanks to Kelsey & his helpers for checking on the house while we were gone.

As with most of our trips, walking and public transport was our way to get around.  This trip was no different, and our walking distance worked out to just over 202km.

Thanks for reading our blogs - we enjoy writing these and it really helps remind us where we have been!

Now we can think about the next adventure!