Kon’nichiwa! In the previous post, I eluded to future plans. Well, it’s now official: next fall we are booked for a tour of Japan. We will be spending sixteen days exploring and learning about the “Land of the Rising Sun”.

Sue has always wanted to visit Japan and my second irrational fear… getting stomped on by Godzilla…has always kept me from traveling there. This trip, we will let her desire overcome my fear.

For the folks that heard the early talk about taking a Japanese cruise, we scuttled those plans. The main reason was that we would spend more time getting on and off the ship and wouldn’t have the time to explore the country. We think that the land tour will be a much better fit for us and it will be harder for Godzilla to track us down.

After reviewing many different options, we decided to take a tour with InsideJapanTours. It will give us a good overview of Japan, Japanese culture, food and customs, plus we’ll get to see big cities, smaller towns, natural beauty and ride the Bullet Train.

The itinerary sounds interesting, moves at a slower pace and includes many cities and sights that we are interested in seeing. They also include many activities that we get to participate in. Activities including cooking classes, ritual drumming, meditation at a shrine with a temple priest and tea with a Geisha-in-training will be interesting and fun.

The flight over will be a long one – a bit over thirteen hours. Hopefully, we’ll be able to sleep on the flight so we can hit the ground running. I’m sure that jet lag will come into play our first few days there, but I’m counting on the excitement to overcome it.

Since they have everything planned out during the tour, I get to work on the extra days: two before the tour and then two after the tour. I have some ideas that might be fun, but we’ll have to figure out the lay of the land before we can plan. Luckily, we have almost a year to figure things out.

We’re busy looking at airfares and pinching ourselves, as it’s hard to believe that we made the leap from our comfort zone of western Europe. However – YOLO!

We have a lot of videos to watch and websites to check out to gear up for next year’s adventures. So for now… Sayōnara!