December 19-27 We happily write this post from the comfort of the Pacific Time Zone! Apologies for the delay--it took us longer than expected to get our bodies over the jet lag. While we can't believe this trip is over, we are so proud of ourselves for completing the journey, and very happy to be back home for a while. The plan was always to try to find a way to fly home from Tokyo, though by the beginning of December we didn't know how long we would actually be able to affor

December 17-19 We only had about 48 hours in Kyoto, and during that time we took almost 40,000 steps. We were warned that Kyoto wasn't a very walkable city, but we tried our darndest anyway. We saw a lot of amazing things. And now my feet hurt. We took the train from Osaka on Wednesday morning. Kyoto and Osaka are very close to each other, so we essentially jumped on a commuter train, similar to the Sounder back home. By the time we got on, it was standing room only, but we f

December 14-17 Our second-to-last flight of the trip was gloriously painless. Officially done with budget airlines, our Cathay Pacific flight included a meal and in seat entertainment (super grateful that I was able to use my Alaska miles to spring for such extravagance). When we got to Osaka, we had to go through a digitized arrival process and then an in person one before we could finally claim our bags, but this all went pretty quickly and we soon found ourselves on the MR

December 11-13 We were not planning on going to Taipei. It had been in the back of my mind for our Asia portion of the trip, because I have a couple of friends who have spent time in Taiwan and recommended we visit, but I hadn't really investigated it further. However, we found out we could easily fly direct from Singapore to Taipei, we could fly from Taipei to Osaka using my Alaska miles, and if we made a quick stop it would bring our final country total to 20 rather than 19

December 8-11 As soon as we got off the plane in Singapore, we knew we were in for a whole new experience. We had such a lovely, relaxing week in Samui, it was easy to forget the little things that come from time in many southeast Asian countries--undrinkable tap water, gasoline for motorbikes being sold in reused alcohol bottles, can't flush toilet paper down the toilet, etc. But even though Singapore is only a couple of hours away, it is seriously a whole different world. I