You know you've been on a plane for 20+ hours when you start to look like your passport photo.

Yes, the Great Champagne Debacle in the Singapore airport at 3 am resolved itself with a whimper--they did take it away from me, but they only smirked instead of laughing out loud. If I had been thinking clearly at that hour (which I wasn't), I would have just opened the darn thing with a celebratory "pop" and gotten everyone in the waiting area a little tipsy before our flight. But even I can't handle warm champagne at that hour. We all hunkered down to endure the 7-hour flight to Tokyo.

My feet were the size of tennis racquets by the time I got to Narita, and after hobbling through the additional security where our bags were all x-rayed AGAIN, I walked through the terminal for an hour to try to get my circulation going again. I changed my last Singapore dollars into Japanese Yen, found a pharmacy and bought a pair of "flight socks," a pair of heavy-duty elastic compression knee socks to hold my feet together for another 10 hours. I downed a bottle of the Japanese version of Gatorade, extracted from a vending machine with the last of my Yen, and proceded into "The Sardine Zone," wherein 400 cranky people were stuffed elbow-to-elbow into a 747 flying tube, forced to eat plastic-wrapped meals every 2 hours, while watching FOUR movies in a row. It was uncomfortable to the extreme and interminable.

Somehow, I managed to fall asleep for the last 90 minutes of the flight, awaking only when the flight attendant plopped still another meal in front of my face. And then, blessedly, we were on the ground, moving like a sleepy herd of cattle through the various chutes of drug-sniffing beagle, immigration, customs and agriculture inspectors. I got to keep my dried Chinese black mushrooms, pistachio nuts (that were supposed to be an accompaniment to the long-lost champagne) and sunflower seeds.

Richard the Driver found me milling about zombie-like at the exit, and bundled me into the cold, clear Los Angeles sunshine. The next thing I knew, I was peeling off my elastic socks, hugging mom, and eating Mexican food and margaritas al fresco at the harbor!

Was it all a dream? Singapore seems far, far away now, except for the pictures. I will post some later today, just to remind myself that I was actually there.