This year, my annual workers’ compensation law conference was held at the Jekyll Island Convention Center instead of its usual location on Saint Simons Island, but since we’re more familiar with the latter location, we opted to stay there and just let me drive a bit farther to my conference […]
I awoke the Monday after Fathers Day to this Facebook message from one of our Tokyo karate instructors: Did you feel the earthquake? Are you okay? My nightmare from our first night in Japan had come true. Luckily, we’d missed it by a day, as it occurred near Osaka, and […]
We boarded our Kyoto Shinkansen train at 7 Sunday morning and arrived in Hiroshima just after 9. My bride had told me a few days prior that we’d be spending Fathers Day at Hiroshima, somewhat apologetically, but that’s how the itinerary had fit together, and was that okay? Who was […]
*Thanks to Hanes for sponsoring this post* Colorado has 4 distinctly awesome national parks. I saw 3/4 of them in 1987 when my folks drove my brother and me from Nashville in a two-toned ’83 Suburban, and I’ve wanted to go back with my own family and explore the diverse […]
We were on the Shinkansen bullet train before 8am on Saturday and walked up to Himeji Castle at 9:30am. I checked in on Swarm and saw that there are free guided tours in English that are excellent, and I’d no sooner declared that we should find out how to get […]
Friday morning about 9:45am, we set off from our AirBnB and discovered a place called Cafe Green Door in a residential area, just a couple blocks from our home, which was a nice change from the previous days’ meats on a stick for breakfast. We had eggs and coffee […]
Thursday, June 14, we rode a series of trains until we met Eric, a quad-lingual KKday tour guide originally from China who lives in Japan and was our guide for the “romantic” train taking us to a horse-drawn carriage taking us to a wooden boat taking us down the Hozu […]
Wednesday, June 13 began with hot coffee at McDonald’s in Kyoto, because that was the only place I could quickly find hot coffee in our new ‘hood (we also had fried meat on a stick from a nearby street vendor). By 9:45, we were at the “Golden Pavilion” — Kinkau-ji […]
We awoke on Tuesday, June 12 to a kaiseki breakfast brought into our room while we sat in our yukatas (i.e., pajamas). After our meal, we made our way down to the bus stop, which took us to the train station for the 3-hour train ride toward Kyoto. But before […]
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 […]