Timeline: From Airplane to Hotel

It's hard to estimate how long things like getting off the airplane, through immigration, etc will take - and I always wish I'd paid attention later when I want to estimate for the next time we travel. There are so many variables, but at least an IDEA of how long it MIGHT take is nice. Luckily, my iPhone now makes it really easy for me to make a timeline! Here it is:

• Landed around 3:20-30 PM
• Off the plane by 3:36 PM

• Got to Immigration line at 3:40 PM

• Done with Immigration and waiting for luggage at 3:57 PM (the sign totally lied to us)

• Got luggage, went through Customs, stopped at post office to pick up our mobile hot spot, and were at the JR Office to redeem our JR Rail Passes at 4:20 PM
• Got to the head of the queue for JR passes at 5:05 PM
• Got to the train platform for our express train to Yokohama at 5:15 PM

• Train departed 544 (as scheduled) - scheduled to arrive in Yokohama at 7:18 PM
• Checked into hotel at 8:00 PM

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.

What we are excited to experience in Japan…

• The Japanese version of Western food
• Vending machines
• Buddhas…en masse
• Karaoke
• Efficient transportation (Shinkansen!!!)
• Japanese TV
• John wearing Japanese pajamas
• Tokyu Hands
• Sakura
• Kawaii
• …all the things we can't even begin to understand that we don't understand.

Itinerary Updates (draft)

• Tokyo guide
• Extra day in Tokyo; 1 less day in Kyoto
• No Kanazawa
• Disneyland during Tokyo Part 2
• Tokyo day trips - Kamakura and Nikko

General updates (draft)

• Passport
• Japan Rail Pass

 

• Currency exchange
• Studi Ghibli tickets

Plans for packing (draft)

These are the bags we plan to use for our trip to Japan:

How we've learned about Japan

We get bored with Lonely Planet travel guides pretty quickly so these are a few things that we've used to augment our Japanese research:

 

Big Bird in Japan:

 

Jiro Dreams of Sushi:

 

Studio Ghibli:

 

Postcard from my dad, 1989:

Hotels

We've booked all of our hotel rooms in Japan!  Our criteria for choosing hotels was pretty basic: 

Cost - $75-$150

Location - short walk to a JR Shinkansen station (bullet trains that we will have almost unlimited access to with our Japan Rail Passes)

Bed size - at least an American double - especially when we realized the common "small double" is just a little larger than a twin size bed here!

Cancellation policy - since we booked our hotels before our plane tickets, we wanted to make sure any reservation we made was 100% refundable (most of the ones we looked at were - we used Orbitz and Booking.com)

Once we found those things, we read reviews on TripAdvisor.  My favorite are the very angry, 1 star reviews because "the TV was in Japanese!" and "the room was so tiny!" (always left by Americans - often with the next review being from a non-American: "the room was very spacious!")  We get that things in Japan are much more compact than we are accustomed to - and in Japanese...since we are going to be in Japan...(I think some people on TripAdvisor must not be able to grasp that).  It was useful to find out how much English the staff seems to know, the quality of the Internet, and what "perks" are included (pretty much breakfast and toiletries at our price-point).

I think the hotels we settled on all look pretty decent:

Tokyo:  Best Western Shinjuku Astina Hotel Tokyo
We figured we'll be pretty overwhelmed by the time we get to our first hotel so a Best Western seemed like a good choice since the familiar brand feels a little more like "home."  We got a standard double room with a buffet breakfast on Orbitz for $125/night.

Osaka/Kyoto:  Shin Osaka Station Hotel
Hotel rooms in Kyoto were hard to find - and expensive when we did - so we decided to use Osaka as our base for exploring the area.  The hotel is very close to the Shin-Osaka Shinkansen Station where we can take a JR train to Kyoto in 15-30 min (much shorter than our daily commutes to work!)  Our room is an economy double from Booking.com for about $106/night.

Hiroshima: Sheraton Hiroshima Hotel
We plan to spend a couple days visiting Hiroshima and Miyajima so we'll spend one night here - and in a deluxe king room (John was pretty excited about that part!)  It was our most expensive room (the king sized bed is a bit of a splurge, but I think we'll deserve it by then) at around $150/night - we found it on Orbitz.

Tokyo:  Mitsui Garden Hotel Ueno
We'll head back to Tokyo for the last couple days to stay in the Ueno/Akihabara/Asakusa area.  Our double room here was about $135/night on Booking.com.

We are also considering a side trip to Kanazawa - if we decide to do that, we have a room booked at the Garden Hotel Kanazawa.  Our double room was about $100/night on Booking.com.

おやすみなさい (Oyasuminasai) and good night!

Itinerary has been posted!

A very rough outline of our current plan is now available on the Itinerary page.  There is definitely no shortage of places to go and things to see - and our Japan Rail Passes and meticulous planning will ensure we visit as many of them as possible (or at least get really lost making a solid attempt trying)!  Hotels, however, are a little harder to find, especially since we will be there during the Sakura season (hopefully), so the rooms we've managed to book are helping to provide the framework.  So, anyway, that's what we have for now.

さようなら and good-bye!

Planning via Pinterest

I love Pinterest...I love it so much I force myself to avoid it so I don't end up spending several hours pinning projects I'll never do and recipes I'll never cook and houses that'll never look like mine.  That being said, I have found it somewhat useful/inspiring for researching and planning our trip to Japan.  Here are links to my boards (FYI - I almost NEVER update the descriptions/comments on things I re-pin):

Japan
Japan - Tokyo
Japan - Hiroshima
Japan - Miyajima
Japan - Nara
Japan - Quirky, Cute, Crafty Shopping
Tokyo Disneyland

Enjoy!