by Jeff Drake | Nov 29, 2018 | Travel
During our tour of Japan we got to meet with two different Buddhist monks, each representing different branches of Buddhism within Japan. These meetings were interesting on several different levels. I studied Eastern philosophies and religions a lot when I was in...
by Jeff Drake | Nov 25, 2018 | Travel
I have been pondering our recent experiences in Japan to try and put my finger on exactly what bothered me about our Japan trip. Generally, we had a good trip, but it didn’t really live up to our expectations and left us feeling that our next trip will be on our own...
by Jeff Drake | Nov 17, 2018 | Travel
Our tour was supposed to avoid cities and focus on “culture”, etc., but Japan is not some third world country. Everywhere you go you see a bustling atmosphere, lots of office buildings, stores and restaurants. Let me tell you, the Japanese are apparently huge...
by Jeff Drake | Nov 17, 2018 | Travel
One thing that was interesting in Kanazawa is when we got to meet with a Fukushima refugee couple. They currently live in Kanazawa and have a restaurant where we had lunch. (It was a vegan restaurant. I’m probably the only one who wasn’t thrilled with our lunch. Every...
by Jeff Drake | Nov 17, 2018 | Travel
Wow, the time has flown by! Too busy doing the tour to take time to blog. It can’t be helped. It seems to be that every time we travel, I am forced to blog about the trip mostly after we return to the states, rather than during the trip itself. That’s okay, actually....
by Jeff Drake | Nov 12, 2018 | Travel
It’s hard to believe that we’ve already experienced half of our tour of Japan! I tried to approach this trip with an open mind. Although I had been to Japan some years ago on business, I didn’t really see anything outside of Shinjuku near my hotel, so I didn’t think...
by Jeff Drake | Nov 11, 2018 | Travel
That’s Japanese for “sorry!” I left my PC in my bag while we went to the mountains and then had issues posting via my smartphone. Pilot error, of course. I’ll write more later. We’re off to see the garden again, this time lit up at night....
by Jeff Drake | Nov 6, 2018 | Travel
We arrived yesterday afternoon with a – thankfully – rather uninteresting flight. Actually, the one thing interesting about this United flight is that we experienced some of the worst airplane food we’ve had in some years. The food was almost unbelievably bad! It was...
by Jeff Drake | Nov 4, 2018 | Travel
Only a few hours to go until we leave for Japan! I tried to schedule a Lyft for 4:45am, but didn’t get any takes, so we’re going to the airport by ordinary taxi. Oh, well. My last post left on in Kanazawa. On day 9 of our trip, after tea with a local Kanazawa family,...
by Jeff Drake | Nov 1, 2018 | Travel
We’re getting down to the finer details for our upcoming trip to Japan – making sure our camera SD cards are empty and the camera lenses are clean; charging all our electronic devices; making sure we have the proper cables; printing out important documents (to go with...
by Jeff Drake | Oct 29, 2018 | Travel
Wow, time is flying! Par for the course for all our other Overseas Adventure (OAT) Tours, as the date for our trip grows closer we’ve now had a chance to talk to our country guide, Hiroshi Ninigawa, and have received a list of our fellow travelers. It looks like this...
by Jeff Drake | Oct 14, 2018 | Travel
My wife and I haven’t been out of the country since June and we were getting restless. So many places to see and so little time! Where to go? Our wish list of travel places to visit is long, so we went through a number of choices before making a final decision. We...
