Mapping our Adventures

We ♥ Google Maps!  It is an incredibly useful planning tool and especially indispensable for traveling in Japan.  We add all the sites we want to see and use different icons to create loose categories (parks, shrines/temples, shopping, food, etc.) This helps us to understand the proximity of the various sites we want to see and allows us to group things together to form our itinerary.  We use the step-by-step walking directions to determine if things are really as close to each other as they appear to be.  It probably sounds mundane, but it's actually pretty cool. 

Japan 2015, Week 3 - Itinerary

I've never been away from home for more than 2 weeks so I wonder if I'll be homesick by the time we get to week #3...I think I'll probably just be craving real American food - like pizza that DOESN'T have corn and mayo on it.

These plans are still very much in the development phase so I don't have many details to add, but here's what we have so far...

Unless you like being the people with the guidebook...

We find it awkward to walk around obviously consulting a guidebook.  It's not that we worry about looking like tourists (we're white Americans in Japan...and John is huge...I think they know we're not locals), but it just feels weird.  We also don't like to spend our vacations staring at our phones (I have more than enough trouble managing to avoid getting run over by bikes as it is.)  Moreover, we don't like being lost and confused so we DO want to have important information, like train numbers, hotel names, and addresses, documented in a convenient place that we can consult quickly and discreetly.

Japan 2015, Week 2 - Itinerary

3 weeks of traveling = a ton of planning...especially when you only have just over a month to do all said planning!  We are not really, stressing out about it, though - once we got our plane tickets booked (easy) and found hotels (much more challenging), we were pretty much ready to go!  Planning helps make the waiting go by faster - and we'll be glad we did it in the end.  ☺ Here's the plan for week 2 of our Japanese Adventure!

Japan 2015, Week 1 - Itinerary

I like having a plan when we travel.  Not a rigid, minute-by-minute itinerary, but a solid framework or outline to provide some structure to our days.  It saves us from wandering around, trying to figure out what to do - and there are about 3 million options at any given time in Japan, so, multiply that by 20 days...going without a plan would be somewhat insane.

Japan, 2015

Hello World...

We are just over 3 weeks away from our 2nd trip to Japan - and we are super excited!

We hope to be more diligent about tracking and posting about our adventures this time.  We find other people's travel blogs very informative and useful - and we've referred back to our own documentation quite a bit in planning for our Adventures in Japan 2.0. 

That being said, adventuring is our top priority so no guarantees...

Kanpai!  乾杯!