This is always the hardest post to write because I have to acknowledge that the trip is over and piling responsibilities back home take over. Saturday night was our last meal in Japan. Joanna said let’s close it out with a bang and get Okonomiyaki one last time. We found one that was a 5 min walk from the hotel that was decently rated. We sat down and I ordered yakisoba noodles and the deluxe okonomiyaki which had shrimp, pork, and squid. I said と チーズ “To chizu” [and cheese]. The woman taking our order clarified if we wanted one deluxe and one with cheese, I said no, a deluxe with cheese. Welp, we ended up getting a deluxe and another one with cheese…whoops I need to work on my Japanese.
We absolutely hit our Japanese food wall here. We filled up on the yakisoba noodles already and really only had stomach capacity to eat one oknomiyaki but the lady is standing right there in front of you and you know how much work she put into making your food so you have no choice but to do your best and eat as much as you can. I had estimated out enough cash to get through this meal and to pay for our subway trips to the airport but with the extra oknomiyaki we were $5 short and this place didn’t take card so I had to run a few blocks away to the nearest ATM so we could pay our bill.
Yesterday was a pretty long day for us travel wise but it couldn’t have gone any smoother. It was raining in Osaka and we needed to walk about 10 minutes to the subway to catch a 30 min ride to the shinkansen terminal so that we could get to Haneda airport in Tokyo to fly home. We had bags of souvenirs and stuff that we bought the last 2 days so I called a cab to take us to the train station to avoid getting soggy for the start of our long journey home.
We were both sad to leave, I paced this trip really well where if we had one or two days “break” from traveling, we could have rallied and done another week in Tokyo…nevermind we could have spent another few months in Japan until our visas or bank accounts ran out.
We could have flown out of Osaka to get home but it would have added an extra $200 or so to the airfare and we already had the JR Pass that covered the $100 shinkansen ride to Tokyo. Besides, the trains are SO on time, I wasn’t worried about getting to the airport with enough time to settle in before our flight.
I did run the numbers on all our bullet train trips and compared it with what we paid for the $360 14 day unlimited JR pass
Hiroshima ¥8,900
Fukuoka ¥9,430
Kagoshima ¥10,440
Kyoto ¥24,050
Kinosaki ¥2,640
Osaka ¥7,360
Tokyo ¥14,520
¥77,340 = $552.25
Almost a $200 savings for getting the unlimited ride pass. Unfortunately they’re increasing the cost of the pass 70% in October to $570 for 14 days and increasing all ride costs as well. Still a good deal but ouch!
Got to the airport at 1pm for our 4pm flight. Had to declare all of our tax free stuff we bought with immigration and headed to the new Delta lounge.
Joanna says that is the best lounge she’s been in so far. I will have to agree with her. They had ramen made fresh to order, awesome drinks, and really good food too.
The 11 hour flight home was uneventful. Got my previous blog post done and started catching up on work emails. Before we knew it, we were home and back to real life again. Joanna’s car wouldn’t start and I had to go to costco to get a new car battery.
One of the souvenirs that I’ve started collecting is subway cards. They look nice, easy to transport, and you can always use them again if you go back to a city. We’ve started displaying them on the fridge at home but these are the ones I have for Japan so far.
The Passmo card is widely accepted across Japan which is what I used for the most part. I didn’t realize Fukuoka had their own subway card otherwise I would have gotten one too. I found a list of all the ones that are used in Japan, guess I’ll need to go back to collect them all:
- Prepaid IC card list
Suica Card – JR East, Tokyo and Eastern JapanPasmo Card – Tokyo MetroIcoca Card – JR West, Osaka- PiTaPa Card – Kansai Area
- Toica Card – JR Central
- Manaca Card – Nagoya Area
- Sugoca Card – JR Kyushu
- Nimoca Card – Fukuoka
- Hayakaken Card – Fukuoka
- Kitaca Card – JR Hokkaido, Sapporo
Joanna got her cosmetics and skincare organized after we got home. Here’s our haul for this trip.
Overall, a really fantastic trip. The day we came back home was June 11th, which is 5 years to the day I got diagnosed with cancer (blog post link). Really thankful my health is doing well, I’ve got a check up at Mayo coming up in the next month which should get me from 6 month checkups to 12 month ones going forward for the next 5 years.
We’ve been waiting 6 years to come back to Japan and everything went according to plan. I spent hours pouring over which cities to visit, places to stay, activities to do and it was just so cool to see it all come to fruition and share it with Joanna, my favorite travel companion.
I don’t think I’ve traveled this much in such a short timespan in a long time, my sleep has been all over the place going to India, back home, then to Japan, and back. Not counting this blog post, I wrote 25 blog posts for each of my days abroad. The stats are kind of awesome and humbling so thank you all for following along. I’ve gotten some really wonderful feedback and comments from people which makes putting the time and effort into sharing these trips with you absolutely worth doing.
This October will mark 5 years being cancer free! I’ve already started planning a trip to Spain with our friends 🙂
Honeymooning after 3 years. That’s a story for the ages. 🙂
You did a fantastic job planning the trip and writing it all up. Thoroughly enjoyed reading about your adventures, thank you for sharing.
Congratulations on the cancer free status!! hugs