Musings

Itinerary-wise, we drew several lessons from our 2019 trip to Tokyo and Hokkaido. For example, we made sure that our places of stay, as far as possible, would be close to the train stations. We gave ourselves buffer time to

Our flight home was departing from Chubu Centrair International Airport at 10:20AM today on Christmas. And over the last few days, we received the usual email reminders from Singapore Air nudging us to do online pre-departure check-in. We dutifully did

The fourth and last property we stayed at this 15 day trip, and in Nagoya. This was probably the hardest region to find accommodation, on account that by the time we’d firmed up our region of travel and dates, many

Our second stop for our last full day this trip: the Nagoya City Science Museum, which boasts the world’s largest Planetarium. Like many of the science museums we’ve been to already, this one in Nagoya features large areas of exhibits

Day 14: we woke up this morning 6:15AM to see this weather in Nagoya: The weather was around 2 degree C, and we decided not to go with the originally planned itinerary for visiting Gujo Hachiman. This was in consideration

Our next stop in Nagoya: the Port Of Nagoya Public Aquarium. The Toyota Commemorative Museum was just a few stops north of Nagoya Station and pretty easy to get to. The Aquarium was much further to the south, so required

The last segment of our trip was centered around the city of Nagoya, one of the larger cities in Japan and also a gateway for international flights coming into Japan. We selected Nagoya airport in September as the arrival and

The kids loved the second property we stayed at over Days 07 to 11 of this trip – Hyatt Hotel Kanazawa – that we had to manage their expectations for the third property over Days 11 to 13! We repeatedly

We were actually a little worried that Day 12 would be a bust after our going up the Shinhotaka Ropeway only to find that the summit was inaccessible because operations on half of the ropeway had been suspended because of

To cut a long story short, our visit to see the Northern Alps turned out to be a major disappointment: our first so far this trip, and hopefully the only one! Basically, the Shinhotaka Ropeway is used by visitors to

Day 11 and we’re onto our third segment of our trip: a 3D2N stay in Takayama to visit several places: starting with Shirakawa-Go today. The itinerary as planned several months ago placed a visit to the famed village nested within

It’s just so easy to use Google Maps to find good places to eat these days. One literally just searches ‘good food near me’, and you’d get a number of dining establishments show up on Maps right away. That’s basically