First Post - Japlanning

This is my first post, more of a test than anything else, for my travel blog of our trip to Japan in May of 2016.  I will be working on the layout and design of the page, as well as working on the formatting here with images and paragraph structure.

In August of 2015 I will be marrying my best friend and fiancee, Jessica, and this trip will serve as our delayed honeymoon.

Visiting Japan has been a lifelong dream of mine; I am half-Japanese and have always taken great interest in my ancestry and Japan's history and culture but have never had a chance to visit.  In fact, this will be my first trip outside the United States and could not think of a better first international trip.

We are still almost a year and a half out but planning vacations has always been almost as fun as the actual trip for me and I have already been busy reading every travel guide and website I can find.  

Road Trip 2012 Map

Two years ago Jess and I drove from our hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota across much of the eastern coast and back, totaling almost 4000 miles and 12 states in 12 days and we spent the months leading up to the trip by mapping out (quite literally) our path and itinerary.

We were not able to go everywhere we had originally planned or do everything we had hoped to do but half the fun was finding something or somewhere new to see if we could add it to the trip.  We color-coded the tabs (food, activities, lodging, etc) and added and removed things as we finalized plans.

We also created many Google Documents to mark down where we would be and when. This helped us plan out where we would be and when, with travel timelines, to make sure we were where we needed to be and if we would have time to add anything else to the agenda.

Road Trip 2012 Itinerary

Two of our four travel books

Even though we're so far away from our trip, and still have a wedding to finish planning, I have already been doing a lot of research and have created several spreadsheets, as this will be a much more complex trip than our East Coast road trip.

My Google Drive folders

While the research for each city will be greater, and the number of activities and sites to see will be greater, I am hoping that we can plan the "where" for each day but leave the "what" we do a bit more up in the air to ensure we aren't forced to stick to too tight of a schedule and not be able to enjoy ourselves.  We will have to make sure we make our trains for our next destination, and make sure we hit our "must-see" areas but otherwise I am hoping we will be able to explore a bit more.

Jess braving the fog in search of a coastal lighthouse

Our favorite day of our road trip was our day up in Maine.  Our only plans for the day were the two hour drive up from Boston and where we were staying that night; other than that we were on our own to explore the coastal towns of our new favorite state.  

Jess loves lighthouses and we spent the day looking up various lighthouses and then traveling to find each one.  I am hoping we can find more days like that when we visit Japan.

Jess looking up a city on the island of Shikoku

Today we went to the bookstore to buy a large enough map of Japan for us to put up on our family room wall and begin to mark where we want to go.  This time we will use string to mark our path so that the post-its don't take up too much room (or fall down for our dogs to eat).

That is all for this first post.  I'll be updating our plans as we work on our itinerary both for where we will be going and what we will be doing.