Dispatch from Manila, Philippines. I have just completed over 48 hours of travel via trains, planes, and something called Grab to arrive at my current destination where it is currently 12:01 in the afternoon, 95 degrees and I have only a fan in this hostel to keep me cool. In other words, I’m home.

For those who don’t know, I have once again embarked on a multi month trek to another part of the world. I am under prepared, do not speak the local languages, have not charted a route home, and have already lost a pair of sunnies (sunglasses, I’m back to borrowing slang). But this time, recognizing my increasing irritability with age and how that may potentially hamper my once legendary friend making skills, I’ve brought along my own friend. My girlfriend, Megan, who it might be better said brought me along. Because while long term travel at budget prices might be my passion, SE Asia was her choice of destination. So here we are, putting our relationship to the test in the form of extended close quarters travel far from home, friends, and most distressingly, pugs. A successful trip may merely mean survival. In order to document my trip and, leave some semblance of a trail in case my incessant puns cause Megan to snap and strand me on an abandoned island, I have to decided to try my hand at blogging. It’s some kind of online journal thing in which for some reason I let everyone on the internet know about what’s going on in my life, it’s supposedly really popular in the Dakotas. So with that rambling preamble over let us commence with me attempting to make my life sound more interesting than it is.

Our travels began on Monday the 13^th when we board the Amtrak from Oklahoma City bound for Dallas. In all of my wandering, this was the first time on the Heartland Flyer, but after the journey I don’t think it will be my last. It cost us $31 apiece and 4 hours of our day and it was comfortable, had at least one fairly scenic section, and allowed me to purchase alcohol before noon. That scenic section involved following the Washita river through the Arbuckles for around a half hour and was a good reminder that there is plenty of beauty in Oklahoma as well. We really enjoyed the trip and highly recommend it to anyone who has a late flight out of DFW or wants to visit Ft Worth and leave the car behind (I know that’s blasphemy in America but try it sometime it’s really amazing).

We arrived at the Ft. Worth ITC around 1 pm. A pretty little train station right in the heart of downtown Ft. Worth, we were greeted by some beautiful wall carvings explaining the history of the African American craftsmen district of the city. After consulting several maps and one helpful ticket vendor, we purchased tickets on one of the area transit trains to DFW airport, near our hotel. As I implore Megan to board the train before it leaves she expresses doubts about which train is actually ours. I tell her to hurry and trust me. Upon checking our tickets, the train employee informs us we are on the wrong train. Thus ends the first and last time Megan blindly trusts me. The next day we wake up at 3:30 AM to catch a shuttle to the airport. Running on about 4 hours of sleep I check our registration and realize I’ve committed another, far more serious, error. We have two tickets purchased, one for myself, Ronald Dwain Hutson, and one for some mysterious alternate reality version of myslef named Ronald Ann Hutson. I immediately call the booking number only to be told that nothing can be done and we are basically screwed. I inform Megan that she may not be accompanying me to SE Asia and she responds with beauty and grace and no small amount of swearing. Fortunately the Spirit Airlines ticketing agent cares not for TSA regulations and changes the name on the boarding pass, assuming that it was an error based on her not changing her name after our marriage (we are not married but I need this ticket fixed). We arrive three hours later in LAX and settle in for our first long layover.

We eat at what I assume is the world’s last Planet Hollywood where we pay $6.50 for a bottle of Budweiser and even more for sub par food. We then head over to the Japan Airlines ticketing desk to once again banish Ronald Ann Hutson from existence. What took our friend from Spirit approximately two minutes takes our new friend nearly an hour and involves no small amount of lecturing about TSA regulations, preparing in advance, and how passports work. We are then walked through procedures for entering another country so we don’t mess that up, I assume on the not entirely incorrect assumption of our new friend that we must be idiots since we couldn’t get a name on a booking correct. Megan takes the brunt of these lectures and handles them with beauty and grace and no small amount of swearing. Next our maternalistic ticketing agent asks to see a marriage license or something that shows her new last name, because she trusts us but just wants to verify. When we have nothing to show her because we are in fact not married, she second guesses all of her decisions but unfortunately has already placed the corrected tickets into our hands. We head off to board our 12 hour flight to Tokyo.

The flight to Tokyo I am sorry to report was entirely uneventful. I read half of a book about Magellan, was fed two mediocre meals, and watched Wonder Woman. Basically the same thing I do at home when I’m off work. After landing in Tokyo we did have one minor complication to overcome during our layover: we had to change airports. While we knew about this slight inconvenience in advance and had researched how to get from Narita to Haneda, airports international, executing is always a trickier proposition. After speaking very slowly to an information agent and having them respond in English that can best be described as “better than my own” we had the information needed to board our train. While train one left exactly on time and arrived exactly on time, train two brought it’s own issues. Almost immediately after mansplaning to Megan about the timeliness of Japanese trains we came to a sudden halt underground and sat for a disturbingly long amount of time. After arrival at the next station we sat for another extended period of time until an announcement was made in the train. Upon watching several people leave the train after the announcement I began to regret having studied every language other than Japanese in my on this earth. I chose to persevere however and two and half hours later we arrived at Tokyo International airport number two.

Here’s the part where I tell you something you already know: flying is the biggest single expense in traveling. This is doubly true for backpacking, where a flight to Thailand can cost over $700 but a hostel bed can cost less that $7. There are ways to shrink flying costs, they involve a whole lot of incognito searches and 10 plus tabs open on the web browser; but more than anything they involve being willing to stretch a 17 hour one way trip into a 35 hour 3 flight trip with two 6 hour plus layovers. When people ask me how I handle this kind of flying I tell them it’s not so bad, I sleep on planes and in airports and I like exploring said airports. This is of course a lie, but it is one that I tell myself as much as anyone because it keeps me from overly dreading the date of departure. All of this preamble is here to tell you that between the first day of waking up at three AM, taking a three hour flight, having a six hour layover, taking a 12 hour flight, and having a nine hour layover, I had slept about three hours. That is until the last three hours of our final layover in Tokyo. After many trials and tribulations and something called Tokyo style pizza we found our gate and lay down across many chairs. Three hours later I was awoken suddenly and violently by Megan who had apparently stuck her finger down my throat after shaking and yelling failed to work. Our flight was leaving and we were not on it, or so we thought. After running to the gate desk we are informed that this flight is not our flight. Yes it is going to the same city, but ours leaves 20 minutes later. We have been asleep at the wrong gate and were saved only because someone thought “I wonder if those sleeping people have a flight to catch in this airport.”

After somewhere between 35 and 45 hours of travel, depending on whether you include the train from OKC to Ft Worth, we arrive in Manila. It is hot, extremely so. We exit the airport after a very eventful trip to an ATM that involved enabling wifi calling to contact a bank and try to figure out the cheapest way to the hostel. Google maps says there is a bus, or series of buses, that will get us there. The airport security guard says no there is not, we should take a cab. Conversation progresses in this manner until I download the GRAB app onto my phone. We take this off brand Uber to the hostel where we are informed we are too early to check in. We are shown to a couch and we proceed to pass out. One of us for far longer than the other.

Anyways, I don’t know how to end these things so I’m gonna say farewell and such. Entry two will cover Manila and initial impressions of the Philippines and whatnot and I’ll write it in a week or whenever I feel like it. I’m ignoring good hostel conversation to write this for you people! In seriousness thanks for reading though.