It's Sunday! Four days until we leave. Whew! Wrapping up details today. We will be gone three weeks but . . . as usual, we are packing very lightly. Two pairs of pants and two dresses for me (with two blouses, one t-shirt and one sweater). David is taking three pairs of pants, three shirts, one sweater and one sport coat. Get used to the outfits below; you will be seeing them over and over again!
I only pack what I can carry myself and the older I get the less I can carry. One of these years I'll just be taking the clothes on my back. Wouldn't that be liberating!!!
We have isolated the other necessities (underwear, makeup, medication, vitamins, phone chargers, etc.) to add to the bags right before we leave.
Our flight to Chicago leaves sooooo early. We have arranged for an Uber driver to take us to the airport at 4:00 a.m. Yikes! But the more tired we are, the better chance that we will be able to sleep on the long flight from Chicago to Tokyo.
For as long as I have known David, he has wanted to travel to Japan. He lived there as a child when his Dad was in the Army serving as an interpreter. He had a Japanese nanny and actually spoke Japanese before he spoke English! He doesn't really remember too much of the language, but he has an affinity for languages. He's hoping some of it will come back to him!
Early on in the planning we decided we would go on a tour to Japan rather than making all of the plans on our own and following our own schedule. A few years ago David discovered a tour company called "Inside Japan Tours" and after much review and research we decided to take one of the tours they offer called "Japan Enchantment." We definitely wanted to be in Japan for the blooming of the cherry blossoms so we picked the tour that starts on April 1st. We actually booked the tour 14 months ago and secured the last two places on a 14 person small group tour. Now we just hope we like our tour mates!
We fly to Chicago early in the morning on March 30, 2017. We have a little bit of a layover before we board an ANA (All Nippon Airlines) flight to Tokyo. The flight from Chicago to Tokyo is about 14 hours (!) so we are splurging and flying business class. For the first time we will have the seats that look like little private cubicles where the seats lie perfectly flat. Hopefully that will allow us to sleep for hours and arrive in Tokyo rested and ready to go.
We arrive in Tokyo around 3:00 p.m. on March 31st, and we will be met by someone from the tour company to drive us to the hotel (about an hour drive). We plan to just relax that evening, maybe take a walk around the neighborhood, and head to the hotel bar on the top floor of our hotel with what looks like an amazing view. I think it's the 26th floor. Our hotel also has a Japanese restaurant, a Chinese resturant, a French restaurant, a buffet, a coffee shop, a lobby lounge AND a patisserie with "home-made bread and colorful sweets!"
The tour begins the next day, April 1st, when we meet our group and tour leader at 7:00 p.m. with a welcome meeting and then a group dinner. That's all I'm going to say about the tour for now. Thank you for following my blog!
