We completed packing the house and getting out the door Monday, just two hours later than planned. Not bad.

Now we are between flights, sitting in Seattle’s airport, waiting for our fight to Narita.

So far, the travel dramas have been minor ones. At United Air Lines check-in, they couldn’t issue boarding passes until they had “proof” that we were going to leave Thailand someday. Since we are on a one-way ticket, it took a few minutes to figure that one out. Then their boarding pass printer decided that it had a 10-coupon limit. Let’s see: four passengers times three segments = 12 coupons. Oops. Susan could only get as far as Seattle while they rest of us go on to Bangkok. United is still struggling through the transition of their computer systems to Continental’s, so the legacy United agents at the counter were challenged by this. Another bunch of minutes and several agents later, all is swell and we can all go. Then at boarding this morning, we were informed that the adults cannot sit in their assigned exit row seats because we are unsafe, what with children elsewhere on the plane. So more boarding passes are produced, and we are on our way.

Life is getting simpler all the time. Now that we have our luggage in hand, we no longer have to decide what to pack or worrying about stuff fitting. It just works now. We’ll see how long this nirvana lasts.