A place for things I found…
So I’m sitting here at the gate at Nashville Airport, waiting to board my flight to Dallas, to catch my main flight to Japan, Thus begins Nerdtour 2025, the Grand Hurrah! Still planning on two months in Japan, to see as much of the country as I can, since this is likely the last trip I can afford.
Will check in often as possible, photos and possibly videos to follow!
It’s coming down to the wire, just about everything I can prepare for is done, now it’s just the nerves. I always get anxious about traveling like this, because so many things are out of my control, like airplane delays and weather. So far all looks good, but that doesn’t get rid of the nagging worry. It probably won’t really go away until halfway across the Pacific! 😆
Stay tuned!
Well, in 8 days I’ll be boarding my flight to Japan. This will be my longest solo venture since I drove across a big chunk of the US back in 2003 (you can see my blog entries from back then in Nerdtour 2003, if I did the pages right).
I’m a little anxious about it, as usual, but also I’m looking forward to it, I’ll be checking a lot of things off my bucket list, at least the international one. I have a lot of things left to see in the US, which I’ll start on once I get back. Well, after resting up and letting my bank account cool off for a while!
Well, here we go again, I’m getting ready to start another trip to Japan, this time it’s going to be a big one! Since I retired last year, I’m not going have the income to be a world traveler anymore, so I decided to make a final grand adventure to the Land of the Rising Sun, lasting 2 whole months! There was going to be a trip in 2023, but layoffs happened and spurred my retirement, then discovering I had 4 blocked cardiac arteries meant I had to get those re-routed. That laid me up for a bit, but I still thought I could make a trip in Spring of 2024, but again events conspired, and I didn’t feel comfortable making the trip so soon (8 months) after my major surgery, so I figured I’d better get healthier before setting off in ’25. Since then I started walking a lot, lost a lot of weight, put my diabetes into remission, and got a clean bill of health from my doctors.
Given all that, and checking my finances, I decided that this year would be my best chance to once more visit Japan during cherry blossom season. Since it may well be my last, given my financial situation, I figured I’d go all out and stay for 2 months, so that hopefully I can see enough of Japan for the rest of my life. After nearly kicking the bucket in ’23, it’s time to check things off my bucket list!
So, starting on March 22, I leave for Tokyo, where I’ll have an apartment for the duration as a base of operations for whatever trips in Japan that I can squeeze in during the time. Oh, and I promise that I will try to blog more often than I did during Nerdtour 2018, since I’ll have more time, and I don’t plan to exert myself into exhaustion like I did back then!
Well, the trip is over now, I’m back in the US and trying to get back into the right time zone. Â Sorry I stopped updating the page, it got to the point where I was too tired at the end of each day to deal with the crappy WordPress interface, it was so much easier to just drop a picture or two and a short writeup into Facebook, so for all who were wanting to see what I did each day, I’ll eventually post some things here, but they won’t be the live blog that I advertised. Â Sorry again about that.
Just a few pics I took wandering up the Sumidagawa Monday evening:
Well, I was here in Tokyo for fireworks on my birthday, but Nature conspired to send a typhoon my way, which forced Tokyo to delay the fireworks. It wasn’t a total washout, I did manage to celebrate by going to Akihabara, which turned out to be much closer to my apartment than I originally thought, only a couple of stops on the subway. The fireworks will go off today, Sunday, but I had already made other plans for this evening, so I’ll end up going to one of the other Tokyo fireworks displays they have over the next couple of weeks.
Some pics from the last few days:
Kamakura fireworks Tuesday
Kiyosumi garden:
Akihabara on my birthday:
