From a land where the sun rarely set to the land of the rising sun . . .

As three of our four major holidays in the last two years were to countries beginning with “I” we feel it is time to move on to the letter “J” as we finally head off to Japan. Japan is rather fashionable at the moment and hopefully we will reap the rewards of having friends that have been recently and we have been relying on their wisdom, although I’m not sure that we’ll spend quite as much time in Uniqlo as the Dapins!

We are really looking forward to this holiday as it has been quite a while since we’ve been away. However it is better late than never and thankfully Mum and Dad are both well and so we are off – although not wanting to tempt fate I have left posting this to the hour before we leave for Heathrow! A big thank you in advance to James at Japan Journeys who moved our holiday on by 7 months when we had to reschedule at short notice and move the trip from March to October. He made it as painless as possible. 

It has always been our belief that you should plan a fabulous itinerary for your holiday and anticipate NOT seeing whichever natural event might occur at the time you are on your trip. That way if it occurs it’s an added bonus. So we never expected to see the cherry blossom when we originally booked our holiday for March and we certainly didn’t plan our itinerary on “chasing” it, afterall we have our own fabulous cherry blossom in the front garden. Similarly when we moved our holiday to the autumn we had other things on our mind than the timing of the leaves’ colour transitions. According to the Japanese Meteorlogical centre we may just catch the start of the yellow transition towards the end of our holiday, but will miss the red one. In our personal Japanese arboretum (i.e our front/back garden)  we have a stunning Sango Kaku Japanese maple in the back and we were lucky enough to see the yellow transtion and the start of the red transition before we left so we won’t complain (too much) if we don’t see any more on our travels. Not that I’m comparing our garden to the impeccable force of nature that is Japan . . . 

It will probably be quite a time before we do one of our major trips again but that is because we have so much to look forward to in the next 12 months – so we’re not complaining, honestly!  

Having refreshed all our Japan knowledge i.e watched gazillions of YouTube videos and saved even more for the flight and scribbled all over our new itinerary, the car is loaded up and we are now raring to go . . . 

You can follow us by the map below as there will be a new marker for each new post. You can zoom in and move around to see more details on the map. The round markers are where we stay and the flags (⚑) are day trips. Any marker that is red has a post associated with it, so click on it. Details of day trips may be in the post associated with the place we stay.