NRT II

 I wonder how many total miles I'd have earned if I'd kept my Northwest World Perks and American Airlines Advantage mileage programs running continuously since I first enrolled in them back in the late 80s. So after enrolling and traveling, there was a period of time that I wasn't traveling and they just fell off the books. AA's program is hardly used to this day because I'm not flying from Europe anymore (LHR to DFW most of the time), but Delta's is still active because codeshare flights allow me to earn miles with them, and my Northwest WorldPerks miles rolled over to Delta after the merger. Living in the Pacific Northwest and flying out of Seattle allowed me to earn miles on Northwest regularly on work travel to NRT and HNL in the past, but I didn't enroll in United's mileage program until 2000. I haven't been flying with them regularly until recently, and found out I lost several thousand miles earned and have been reset to 0. Nothing I could do about that. Just wasn't flying with them and that's the rules of their program.

Sitting at Narita waiting for our flight back to Honolulu made me think about all of that. As many times as I've flown into Narita over the past 25+ years (holy cow - makes me seem like I'm an old guy), it made me think back to days past when I transited through here.

I remember years ago when I had to fly from here to Detroit on a 12-hour flight and happened to witness one of the most beautiful sunsets I'd ever seen during my time in Japan. It was bittersweet actually, because I was leaving Japan for good as a resident and it was literally my last evening in country.  So whenever I come back to Japan and land at Narita, I always seem to remember these things and am thankful I still have the opportunity to fly into or connect from here.