A Dream Come True

When I started my blog 18 years ago, I never could've imagined how my life would've turned out.  Back then blogging was the big thing that so many people were doing. It was a great way to share what you were doing with family and friends and now lots of people Instagram and TikTok instead. 

Blogging all of our Japan memories has been a school holiday project for me as it was such a special trip to us, and I really didn't want to forget all of the little things we did. I love Instagram and regularly post on there, but it's not the same as recording your memories like this.  I haven't written it for anyone else but just love having all of our memories in one place. 

When I woke up on our last morning, we opened up the blinds and were so happy to be able to see Mt Fuji from out of our window again.                                          

                                         

We found this great kids' TV show where they teach English, and the lesson was about idioms.  Being in Japan definitely gave me a great understanding of what my students and their families go through when moving to Australia with no English and made me realise even more how incredible they are to be able to pick up a new language and culture. 

Our plane didn't fly out Narita airport until 8:55 pm and we didn't have to check out of our hotel until 12 pm which was great as it meant we could have a sleep in and a slow morning of packing. 

When we arrived at our hotel at Tokyo Bay, I booked a limousine bus which is a bus which goes directly to the airport from the hotels. We asked if we were able to leave our luggage after check out and they said we could, so we then spent the afternoon getting some lunch and looking around the shopping centre at the Maihama Train Station near Disneyland.  The shopping centre was actually way bigger than I realised.  The boys found some more gacha to use up the rest of their coins. 

                                           

I asked the boys what we should get for our last lunch in Japan and we all agreed on ramen.  I was so impressed with Harri who had gone from being quite fussy about the food and not knowing how to use chopsticks, to choosing to get ramen and just going with the chopsticks. 

                                           

Our whole trip we hadn't seen a supermarket (but lots of convenience stores) and we finally found a supermarket in the shopping centre. I loved seeing all the delicious cheap meals that you could buy and even heat up in a microwave within the supermarket. 

                                          

We went back to our hotel to grab our luggage and caught the limousine bus. I was so glad that we booked it because it went around to all the other hotels in the area on the way, and it got full very quickly and there were a lot of people lining up to get on the bus without a reservation. 

We got to the airport quite early and Jalen had done some investigating and knew which terminal had the best shops, as he really wanted to go to the Pokémon store at the airport.  We put our luggage into a locker (as we couldn't check in yet) and caught the free shuttle bus to the terminal with lots of shops. There were lots of things to look at and lots of places to eat. 

Harri was in heaven as there was a viewing deck where you could watch all the planes take off and land.  There were a lot of people out there. 

We all enjoyed a massage before we caught the shuttle bus back to our terminal, so that we could grab our luggage and check in for our flight. 

I booked three seats together and then one across the aisle, but for some reason there was a woman in the seat that I'd originally booked, and our seats had been changed. She didn't look very friendly and although she could see we were a family and that we were separated she didn't offer to swap seats (she was in the aisle and could've easily have swapped seats with Jay or Harri who also had an aisle seat) and I was too scared of her to ask. She had obviously flown internationally many times because she was very prepared for a good night's sleep. 

I thought it was smart booking a night flight, but it was the worst night ever. I was in the window seat and couldn't sleep at all because I was worried about Kobe in the middle who also wasn't able to sleep. I kept trying to make him comfortable and we both needed to go to the toilet but the woman next to us slept like a log for hours and we couldn't get out. As soon as she stood up, we both jumped up to go to the toilet.  My TV screen also wasn't working for most of the trip, so I was stuck just looking at the screen of where we were. 

Jay and Harri also didn't get a lot of sleep but slept better than Kobe and I did. 

We arrived in Brisbane at about 6:30 am and Chrish came and picked us up and we stayed at his house a couple of nights before coming home.  Kobe fell asleep about ten minutes after we got into his car. 

I was happy to be back in Australia because I felt like I did all I wanted to do on our trip and couldn't have asked for a better time with the boys, but I was also sad that I wasn't sure when we would get back to Japan.

These videos are of our highlights while we were in Tokyo and then a video about the whole trip. I have the videos with music on my Instagram, but I took the music off to upload to YouTube (the best way to see videos on my blog) because I didn't want YouTube to take them down because of copywrite issues with the music. 

They say that once you start travelling you get the travel bug and we've definitely got that, but all of us just want to go back to Japan and are already saving up to do that. It really was a dream come true.