The original plan was to begin the journey from Canada. Why you ask? Well, when I booked in January the cheapest fares from New York were with Air Canada - I really did not want to fly with them because I do not have any frequent flyer status so could not try for upgrades etc.. However, I knew that if Air Canada were selling cheap tickets from New York it is usually the case that the US airlines would retaliate and would sell cheap tickets form Canada, which was the case. I saved over $2000 plus I could use some points to upgrade us to business class on the way back. Our flight to Tokyo would be with the Japanese airline ANA who are much better than any Canadian or US airline.
There are so many flights to Toronto from New York I did not think it would be a major hassle so I booked two $100 flights the day before and a hotel.
Fast forward to last week - almost the entirety of the North East airspace had major problems. We were flying with United who were cancelling 1 in 4 planes. It was a combination of weather, computer system failure and air traffic control staffing. Everyone (Airlines, the government) is blaming each other but no matter what the reason the planes are not flying.
Fortunately, we did make it Toronto with only a two hour delay (first day without serious storms but our plane still had mechanical issues). However, the next morning our flight was cancelled. In these situations you need to do your own research and because I travel so much I even pay of a service called 'expertflyer' so I can see flight availability and it was really not looking good. Even if we would have started in New York those Tokyo flights were being cancelled. Although there were some options from the West Coast there was just no way to get there from New York or Toronto.
I did find one way - to go the long way round via Europe so when I finally got through on the phone and she told me there were no flights until July 3rd (not ideal for a trip when we return on the 7th) I prompted her to look at Lufthansa. She found the same flight and got us on it, probably the last two seats.
We lost a day because it was so much extra time going that way but we made it after flying just under 10,000 miles (about 7 hours to Frankfurt and 12 hours to Tokyo with a long layover so about 26 hours in all).
