Monday, June 11 started early, as we boarded our Shinkansen “bullet train” at 8am. I was excited about my first ride on these super fast trains I’d heard about as a child. We grabbed breakfast on the platform to eat on the ride to Odawara station, where we took a […]
Sunday, June 10, we really slept in and did not hit the 7-11 til nearly 10am! It felt good. Then, we took the train to hit a museum all of us were really excited about: Miraikan, aka the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, aka the “robot museum.” But […]
On our fourth day in Tokyo (Saturday, June 9), we were finally able to sleep in a bit and hit the 7-11 for our eggs and onigiri at 8:30am instead of the usual 6am. By 10, we were inside the National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno Park. The […]
My son and I sat quietly for several minutes on one of the several hundred stone steps we’d climbed to reach the Shinto shrine at Nikko, a UNESCO World Heritage Site northeast of Tokyo. His sisters and mom were putting their shoes back on somewhere behind us. A mountain stream […]
I awoke at 5am on June 7 and walked to the nearest 7-11 for breakfast of eggs and some triangular rice thing with meat inside before taking the train down to a sumo gym to watch giant men in diapers push each other outside of a dirty circle. There weren’t […]
We landed in Tokyo on June 6 about 2pm and took the monorail, and then the subway, to our AirBnb in Ginza, deposited suitcases, and started exploring what felt like a new planet. Every man wore a white button up shirt and either navy or black slacks. Every woman wore […]
We woke up early (and cold) in our tent on Friday, April 6. It was my 9th soloversary (I like to remember the anniversary of quitting my job and starting my own law firm; it’s also my late maternal grandfather’s birthday), and we had a very difficult-to-book ranger-led canoe trip […]
We arrived at historic Jamestown as soon as it opened on Thursday morning, exploring the glasshouse and fort buildings before going to the archaearium and visitor center (taking in a 360-degree film there–best NPS movie theater I’ve seen!), where I added a cancellation to my NPS passport book. The guide […]
Wednesday morning of spring break 2018, we parked at the visitor center and walked across a long bridge that’s supposed to take you back in time a few hundred years, into colonial Williamsburg. I needed coffee, so our first stop was the Liberty Lounge, which offered free coffee and snacks […]
On Tuesday of spring break 2018, we awoke in downtown Richmond and arrived just after 9am at Tredegar Iron Works to see the national park service visitor’s center, so the children could get yet another junior ranger badge whilst we toured where the CSS Virginia (FKA the “USS Merrimack”) was […]