Tag: Japan Trip

First blossom day, part 2: Shinjuku Chuo Park

So, after leaving Sumida Park, I took the train to Shinjuku, about 30 minutes away. I put “Shinjuku Park” in the train schedule app, which gave me directions to what I thought was the main cherry blossom park in Shinjuku. When I got there, I was a bit underwhelmed by the park. It turns out there was a good reason for that, I had put in the wrong destination, I should have put in Shinjuku Gyoen Botanical Park, which is much larger and more impressive! (I’ll go there some other time, but it won’t be quite the same!) In the words of Jack Reacher, “Details matter!”

So, I didn’t see quite as much at the park as I wanted, but I did get some nice shots of things in the park near sunset. The park is basically in the middle of official buildings, like the Tokyo Municipal Government building, a very impressive building that has free observation decks (which I hope to get to while I’m here).

Tokyo also has some unique architecture, like this building, nicknamed the “Cocoon Building”.

So, after I entered the park, I noticed that there were some trees around the central lawn, and some people taking advantage of the day to get some late-afternoon “hanami” in. There weren’t that many people, but there were some families and some school kids there, and the setting sun did make for some interesting shots.

There was also a local shrine, which had some nice trees on their grounds.

All in all, it was a nice wrap-up of a very nice day, one of the first on my trip so far! 

The next day, Saturday the 5th, I went to a much larger and nicer park,
the Koishikawa Botanical Garden, but that’s for another post, soon!

My first blossom day, part 1: Sumida Park

Well, Friday the 4th finally cleared up, weather-wise, and I got to go where I failed to get to on Thursday, which is just as well, given how much nicer the wather was on Friday! I’m breaking this day’s report in two parts, because I got so many great shots of blossoms in Sumida Park and Shinjuku Park, that I don’t want to make a boringly large single post!

I’ll start with Sumida Park, at the beginning of the day. I made it up to Oshiage, which is a part of town at the foot of the Tokyo Sky Tree Tower, which is so huge that pictures can’t do it justice! It’s over 640 meters tall which works out to just over 2080 feet! I didn’t go up to the observation decks on this day, that will be for another day, today was for cherry blossoms!

After a short quarter-mile walk towards the river, I reached Sumida Park, which basically has two spaces, a small plaza-like park, where lots of people were enjoying their “hanami”, a couple of shrines, and a long narrow walkway park on both sides of the Sumida River, each side stretching for about a kilometer, 0.6 miles.

I ended up walking the whole way on both sides, as well as a short time in the plaza part. The walkway is where there were all kinds of booths, selling different kinds of food and drinks, and I got to see the tourboats cruising the river, full of tourists looking at the blossoms on both sides.

The cherry trees weren’t the only things blooming, of course, there were flower beds all along the river, with all kinds of flowers all blooming at once. It was also kind of neat interacting with the birds, I’ve noticed that the birds are practically tame, they will let you come within a couple of feet of them, and they don’t usually fly away, they kind of walk away, looking at you, as if to say “what, no food? What good are you? I’m outta here!”

So, I ended up going over one of the bridges to Asakusa, to catch a train to Shinjuku Park, another well-known park with lots of cherry trees. But that’s for the next post!

Finally! Fuji!

Just a quick post, I checked another item off my bucket list! For almost 18 years, 6 trips, many delays and much bad weather, I have been trying to see Mount Fuji, and finally got to see it, snow-capped and amazing, along with cherry blossoms!

I have been checking the weather for the Shizuoka area, around Mount Fuji, and the weather for Wednesday said there was a 1% chance of cloud cover, so I made my plans to leave early Wednesday morning. The plan was to get to Enoshima, to the south of Tokyo with a famous view of Fuji from the east, get there with the morning sun shining full on, and hopefully finally see the mountain. And I made it! I rode trains to Ofuna, got on the Shonan Monorail, and when I got to Enoshima station there was an observation deck with a view towards Fuji, and there it was! It was kind of hazy, and a bit hard to see, but it was unmistakable!

Now, I can finally get on with the rest of the trip, at peace!

Some night shots along the Sumidagawa, bridges and birds and boats, oh my…

So, I set out on a chilly day that wasn’t raining much, intending to go to Sumida Park, up near Sky Tree Tower, but when I got to Kiyosumi-shirakawa Station, I discovered that I had left my Suica fare card back at the apartment. I didn’t want to make the mile or so walk back just to get the card and walk the mile or so to the station again, so I decided to just roam around the Kiyosumi area, to see what I could see. I ended up going further north, up to Morishita, almost halfway to Sky Tree, but it was getting late and I figured I’d better head back south toward Monzennakacho and my nice warm, dry apartment!

So, I made my way back to the river, because I knew there was a park and walking path pretty much all the way down, on both sides of the river. I got to see part of the city skyline, and Sky Tree of course. There was also this huge bird, I think it was a heron, perched on the railing, casually walking down the rail, I got within 5 feet of it, and it just looked at me! I’ve noticed the birds are all remarkably calm around people here!

I got a bit turned around a couple of times, because I thought for some reason I was south of Kiyosumi, but I was actually north. Once I got my bearings, I got to catch them lighting up the bridges, some of which were historic!

At the end, I decided to try to see some more of the illuminated cherry trees along the canal in Monzennakacho, before retiring for the night.

After landing in Japan, worn out.

So, after getting to Nashville BNA Airport, walking from the airport Hilton at 4 AM, I managed to get on the flight to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport with plenty of time to spare. The BNA->DFW flight was uneventful, I got to DFW on time and got to the gate for the flight to Japan, and that’s when it all went FUBAR.

The plane scheduled to fly us to Narita Airport in Japan was sitting being “maintenanced”, for an unspecified problem (at least they wouldn’t tell us). To top it off, the flight was overbooked, and they kept asking for volunteers who had “flexible flight plans” to get re-booked on a later flight. Who in their right mind is that “flexible” about flying to Japan?

At any rate, they had no ETR for the repair work, and kept posting new estimated departure times, 30 minutes at a time. Once maintenance was finished, they had to hustle us onto the plane so the flight crew could take off without running out of their allotted flying time, we were settled in, the captain announced they had paperwork to complete, but about 10 minutes later announced we had to “deplane”, since they ran out of time.

Once we were back in the terminal, they announced that a new crew was being sought, and that they would fly that plane to Japan, just later than planned. It was supposed to leave DFW at 12:05 PM, but it was almost 5 when they made us play “plane-deplane”. Once they had a crew scheduled they had to get them to the airport, so they scheduled the new departur at 7:45 PM, almost 8 hours later. This meant we’d arrive in Japan at 11:20 PM on Sunday evening.

At the appointed time, we boarded again (with some trepidation) but we ended up staying on the plane, until it took off sometime after 8 PM Saturday night. The flight itself was uneventful, and we landed at the scheduled time. It took only a few minutes to get through Immigration and Customs, I had to show the paperwork for my 2 month supply of prescription meds, and then I managed to catch the last train from the airport, headed into Narita town and my hotel.

If it works, this video I shot in the hotel room, just after midnight, just before I crashed. I recovered and went into Tokyo later Monday morning and picked up the key to my apartment, but that’s for a later post.

One week to go, Japan is in sight…

Well, in 8 days I’ll be boarding my flight to Japan. This will be my longest solo venture since I drove across a big chunk of the US back in 2003 (you can see my blog entries from back then in Nerdtour 2003, if I did the pages right).

I’m a little anxious about it, as usual, but also I’m looking forward to it, I’ll be checking a lot of things off my bucket list, at least the international one. I have a lot of things left to see in the US, which I’ll start on once I get back. Well, after resting up and letting my bank account cool off for a while!

Here we go again! Nerdtour 2025 begins this month!

Well, here we go again, I’m getting ready to start another trip to Japan, this time it’s going to be a big one! Since I retired last year, I’m not going have the income to be a world traveler anymore, so I decided to make a final grand adventure to the Land of the Rising Sun, lasting 2 whole months! There was going to be a trip in 2023, but layoffs happened and spurred my retirement, then discovering I had 4 blocked cardiac arteries meant I had to get those re-routed. That laid me up for a bit, but I still thought I could make a trip in Spring of 2024, but again events conspired, and I didn’t feel comfortable making the trip so soon (8 months) after my major surgery, so I figured I’d better get healthier before setting off in ’25. Since then I started walking a lot, lost a lot of weight, put my diabetes into remission, and got a clean bill of health from my doctors.

Given all that, and checking my finances, I decided that this year would be my best chance to once more visit Japan during cherry blossom season. Since it may well be my last, given my financial situation, I figured I’d go all out and stay for 2 months, so that hopefully I can see enough of Japan for the rest of my life. After nearly kicking the bucket in ’23, it’s time to check things off my bucket list!

So, starting on March 22, I leave for Tokyo, where I’ll have an apartment for the duration as a base of operations for whatever trips in Japan that I can squeeze in during the time. Oh, and I promise that I will try to blog more often than I did during Nerdtour 2018, since I’ll have more time, and I don’t plan to exert myself into exhaustion like I did back then!

Nerdtour Japan 2018 – Birthday washout…

Well, I was here in Tokyo for fireworks on my birthday, but Nature conspired to send a typhoon my way, which forced Tokyo to delay the fireworks.  It wasn’t a total washout, I did manage to celebrate by going to Akihabara, which turned out to be much closer to my apartment than I originally thought, only a couple of stops on the subway.  The fireworks will go off today, Sunday, but I had already made other plans for this evening, so I’ll end up going to one of the other Tokyo fireworks displays they have over the next couple of weeks.

Some pics from the last few days:

Kamakura fireworks Tuesday

Kiyosumi garden:

Akihabara on my birthday: