A Trip Home!

Everyone says the first year in Japan is the most overwhelming. You're not a tourist who can happily and care-free like see everything in a week and then return home happy as a clam. No. You're living in Japan. You can't go sight see everyday or eat out everyday (you'd be broke). You have to learn the nuances of the language, people, traffic rules, facial expressions and much more. Everyday is a challenge in some way. After awhile, your brain just goes on fatigue. You can't remember if you should bow to the person who got out of your way, give a polite "Konichiwa!" or smile politely. I think John and I have hit that fatigue. We're ready to go back to the US for a little bit and charge out batteries.

A round trip ticket from Tokyo to San Fransisco or San Jose, California is about $2600 per person. So you can see going back to the US is a costly venture. The Air Force is constantly flying planes between Japan and the US. They bring cargo back and forth between the Air Force bases. If these Air Force planes are not full, they allow passengers on the flights. They call these flights MAC flights or Space Available Flights.

Here's how it works. You call the MAC flight desk of the place you want to fly out of (in our case Yokota, which is three hours away). A recording will give you a schedule of all flights with Space Available in the next three days. All passengers are assigned a priority category. Since we'll be traveling on vacation, we're a priority three. Once John goes on leave, he can submit all his paperwork for the MAC flight. The office will call him and let him know when the next available flight is for his chosen destination. We show up on that day and cross our fingers there's room for us to board. If not, we try again the next day....and the next....and the next....

So as you can see, MAC flights may not be ideal for people who have to plan or who are returning for a specific event. The reason people take these flights is because they're free. If you're going to be traveling on a commercially chartered flight, then the cost is only $30/person.

The plane may look like a commercial airline (in which case you pay $30) or it looks like this:

Yup. These planes are free. But as you can see it looks like you're bound for some Star Trek mission and you have to sit like that for 13 hours.

Some MAC flights land in various places. For example if we wanted to go to Travis Air Force Base, which is really near John's hometown, we would probably have a layover in either Hawaii or Alaska. At any layover you run the risk of being bumped off the flight for someone in a higher priority category than you.

Once we land in either California or Seattle (the two places we've chosen as our destination) we will buy commercial tickets for me to go home to Alabama and John to get to San Jose.

After our vacation we will be returning to Japan on a commercial flight. On the way back we don't have as much time flexibility as we will on the way there.