Okay, I’m settled into my apartment now, got a lot of the things I need to live here for the next 60-ish days, so I thought I’d do a quick walk-around to show where I’m staying. It’s not very long, because it’s not a very big apartment!
So, basically I’m here, in Tokyo, staying at an apartment building owned by Sakura House, which is a company that rents exclusively to foreigners on a monthly basis, which for me here is about $1000 per month at the current exchange rate. It’s pretty centrally located, as you can see by where the Emperor lives in relation!
So, this little video will explain what my apartment in that building looks like. It’s not large but it’s comfortable and affordable, and I can keep all my stuff here.
After landing in Japan, worn out.
So, after getting to Nashville BNA Airport, walking from the airport Hilton at 4 AM, I managed to get on the flight to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport with plenty of time to spare. The BNA->DFW flight was uneventful, I got to DFW on time and got to the gate for the flight to Japan, and that’s when it all went FUBAR.
The plane scheduled to fly us to Narita Airport in Japan was sitting being “maintenanced”, for an unspecified problem (at least they wouldn’t tell us). To top it off, the flight was overbooked, and they kept asking for volunteers who had “flexible flight plans” to get re-booked on a later flight. Who in their right mind is that “flexible” about flying to Japan?
At any rate, they had no ETR for the repair work, and kept posting new estimated departure times, 30 minutes at a time. Once maintenance was finished, they had to hustle us onto the plane so the flight crew could take off without running out of their allotted flying time, we were settled in, the captain announced they had paperwork to complete, but about 10 minutes later announced we had to “deplane”, since they ran out of time.
Once we were back in the terminal, they announced that a new crew was being sought, and that they would fly that plane to Japan, just later than planned. It was supposed to leave DFW at 12:05 PM, but it was almost 5 when they made us play “plane-deplane”. Once they had a crew scheduled they had to get them to the airport, so they scheduled the new departur at 7:45 PM, almost 8 hours later. This meant we’d arrive in Japan at 11:20 PM on Sunday evening.
At the appointed time, we boarded again (with some trepidation) but we ended up staying on the plane, until it took off sometime after 8 PM Saturday night. The flight itself was uneventful, and we landed at the scheduled time. It took only a few minutes to get through Immigration and Customs, I had to show the paperwork for my 2 month supply of prescription meds, and then I managed to catch the last train from the airport, headed into Narita town and my hotel.
If it works, this video I shot in the hotel room, just after midnight, just before I crashed. I recovered and went into Tokyo later Monday morning and picked up the key to my apartment, but that’s for a later post.
And I’m off! (we know)
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!
Countdown continues, less than 48 hours till takeoff
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!
One week to go, Japan is in sight…
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!
Here we go again! Nerdtour 2025 begins this month!
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!
Naritasan temple – last day
Nerdtour 2018 – complete with apologies
All,
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.