User blog comment:Omega natsu2/Episode 176: The Dragon King, Review./@comment-24536822-20140406201326/@comment-7418318-20140407100605

The mechanics behind the gate could just as well have been explained after the crashlanding.

It might even have built up more suspense, since it would have made some people believe that with the gate destroyed the Dragons would be stuck here.

What F-Lucy dropped was not the journal but a little note-book. They looked completely different. The journal was a hard-cover book with ornaments on the cover while the thing she dropped was just a feature-less notebook, though the anime shows it even better at 12:20.

Furthermore what she wrote in that notebook was barely legible, but neither Lucy nor Yukino had the slightest bit of trouble to read what was in the journal.

And then there's the matter of how F-Lucy was supposed to bring the journal over to this timeline in the first place. When Lucy was captured (something that both timelines had in common) she very clearly did not have a journal with her and neither did the rescue team bring it to her. When the Dragons attacked, she was initially knocked out while still in her cell after being recaptured.

Since she didn't have the journal with her, she must have left it back in the inn. So do you really think that F-Lucy went from the destroyed prison cell all the way back to the inn and back to the castle (where the Eclipse Gate was)... and all that while Dragons were destroying the city all around her?