You may have noticed while reading the plans, I was hesitant to use pronouns (I, We, Us), which made the writing awkward. The reason for this is because I wasn’t clear on if I was going by myself or a with a friend, Herman, who was still deciding if he liked my plans or not.
And then, this evening, I checked to see if the KLM prices were still dropping, but in-fact most of the flights had taken a huge hike, in some cases by over £100, so I told Herman the brown stuff may be about to hit the fan if we don’t act quick, and I think the sense of urgency may have been the decider for him. As for myself, despite initially planning to go alone, I’d got my hopes up so much about having a companion I was less enthusiastic about going solo. So, we did some final checks, and refusing to buy tickets unless he’d got a confirmed booking, I nagged at him a while, and, well, we now have tickets 
The downer is that as I booked the tickets, I got a message saying that because someone else has just bought tickets for the flight, the price has risen for my own ticket. Dammit Herman!
The next rush now will be at 1:30am on either the 21st or 22nd of this month, depending on if we decide to fly out to Amami on the morning of or the night before the eclipse. The reason being that Japan’s domestic airline opens bookings at 9:30am two months in advance of the flight, and there’ll probably be 1000 other people wanting to make the same journey…