No Regrets!

Hawaii with my 3GD friends last fall was such a success that, upon returning home, conversations quickly turned to where we could go next as a group. Alas, Scott has a lot of things going on in his life and has bowed out of a trip this year, leaving me and Dave to choose our own adventure. So the next trip will be 2GD, not 3GD. (more…)

Credit to Dave for the witty title. Occasionally, he throws out a gem.

After a call with Dave to hammer out the dates and basics, it was time to dive deep into Japan research. It’s a monumental effort, partly because I’m unfamiliar with the country, but also because there’s so much to do and see. And the Japanese names for everything tend to run together, making it hard to keep things straight. (more…)

Flights are booked! Now it’s time to hammer out all the details.

ChatGPT has helped us fine-tune the itinerary for our 2 1/2 weeks in Japan, with a focus on making our route and even daily schedule as efficient as possible. This is… too easy. And all the planning culminates in the most beautiful nerdgasm when it’s neatly laid out in a properly formatted Google doc. Dave teases me about my love affair with AI and Google docs, but that’s OK. It really is a magical combination for trip planning. (more…)

The planning continues. It took some patience with surprisingly clunky and poorly translated Japanese websites, but all of our accommodations for the trip are booked!

As expected, Dave opted for the bougiest hotels he could find for our big city stays, and he’s really outdone himself. The two-bedroom suite we’ll be sharing in the Bellustar Tokyo looks exquisite, and the Four Seasons Kyoto is just as nice. He’s also booked the W Osaka, which is as beautiful as you’d expect any W property to be. (more…)

In just three weeks, Dave and I are off to Japan. We’ve both been working feverishly to fine-tune our itinerary, with my focus being activities and transportation logistics. This has been surprisingly tedious and complicated, as my assumption was that, in a country where toilets have more buttons than my TV remote, I assumed the online booking experience would would be sleek and efficient. But it turns out that many of Japan’s booking websites and apps look like they were built by a high school student in the mid-90’s, don’t work they way they should, and sometimes don’t work at all. (more…)

As preparations for our Japan trip wind down, I turn my attention to more thoughtful ponderings on the place we are going, a place with rich history and a culture perhaps more different from my own than any other. (more…)

So the baseball gods frowned upon us, knocking out all Tokyo teams and sending the Hanshin Tigers and Softbank Hawks to the Japan Series. Games will be in Osaka and Fukuoka, too far for us to reach easily from Tokyo. Alas, there will be no live Japanese baseball for us on this trip. We will have to settle for the local sports bar experience in Tokyo. (more…)

They kept us well-fed on the plane, first with chicken teriyaki and then a ham sandwich and finally a cheese omelet. After meal service, the windows in the cabin were dimmed to the extreme, rendering the sky nearly black and the sun as a bright, perfectly round disc. An otherworldly scene with a dark blue glow that my puny iPhone camera sensor couldn’t capture. So beautiful, I couldn’t stop staring at it. (more…)

I woke up this morning feeling amazing. Rested, recharged, and adjusted to Japan time. Dave, on the other hand, was a mess. He barely slept last night, victim of the jet lag and wracked with the crippling anxiety of tonight’s dinner at Sky Restaurant 634. The restaurant is on the 345th floor of Tokyo Skytree, the highest tower in Japan. Dave has known this and been nervous about it for months. Today is the day, and Dave is so crushed by his debilitating fear of heights that he couldn’t sleep. Blackout curtains, melatonin, noise-canceling earbuds, and binaural meditation music did not help. (more…)

Dave did not sleep last night. Well, he did, but only for three hours. He tried everything, from sleeping aids to listening to his meditation music. He counted to 10,468 before giving up. Every siren from the streets below found a way to pierce through his noise-canceling headphones. Nothing worked. And then his mind started worrying about not sleeping, which of course set him spinning and produced more anxiety and made it worse. Turns out his worrying about the dinner in Tokyo Skytree, which is what he thought was keeping him up for the first couple of nights, was never the issue after all. Something else is afoot. Is he still struggling with the time difference? (more…)