Todd and Sara's 2007 Trip to Japan

HOW IT ALL STARTED

Since Sara came up with the idea to go to Japan, we've been reading and planning.

We started off figuring the places we wanted to see. We both bought a travel book and started writing down our ideas. We initially wanted to see parts of the whole country.

One idea we had was to go skiing somewhere in Hokkaido, the northern island. Sara found a site that estimated travel times from one place to another. We input Tokyo to a northern city near skiing. It looked like it would take about 4 hours to get there. Then we noticed that the time included a plane flight. Once we unchecked the include airplanes box, the time went to about 15 hours. So much for that idea.

Northern Japan swiftly gets nixed. Shortly followed by southern Japan and Okinowa. So with just the main island of Honshu, we decided to see the modern city of Osaka, visit the temples and shrines of Kyoto, experience Hiroshima, live with the monks in Koyasan (a.k.a. Mount Koya), tour Tokyo, and ski in Nagano.

So, now you need to read the rest of the blog to see how things turned out.