Musings

This has been our longest family vacation at 18 days, and it was a rare opportunity for us to be able to take such a long holiday. The vacation went remarkably well: we were able to hit most of our

The fifth and last of our blog entries observing our places of stay on this 18-day trip to Japan! We stayed at the APA Hotel Keisei Ueno Ekimae for just one night, so our notes would probably be limited by

Our final day in Japan, and this would be a post recording our experiences of arriving at Narita and leaving Japan! Firstly, perhaps it’s a Singaporean thing to over-plan and over-compensate when it comes to traveling. But we had been

Day 17 today was our last major relocation from Nagano prefecture back to Tokyo. We initially toyed with the idea of racing from Nagano to Tokyo and flying home on the same day, but we couldn’t find a suitable flight

We were targeting to stay within Nagano city and close to the train station for the Nagano segment of our trip months ago early on in our planning. Unfortunately, there seemed to be relatively few hotels around the train station,

So many people have already made this trip to see the snow monkeys at Jigokudani Monkey Park that it’s hard to really add much further value in any blog post about our visit. But perhaps I’ll angle my post here

Day 16! And our last full day in Nagano prefecture. We’d booked through Klook a day visit to a highland for snow activities and also to visit that very famous snow monkey park. In a sense, this day trip was

We’re not massive snow activity persons. Nonetheless, when wintering in the country, we’d necessarily need to at least do some of it — if nothing else, just to tick off the item on the ‘must-do’ list! Unfortunately, the daughter had

This wasn’t in our planned itinerary, but we saw an information board during our visit to Matsumoto Castle yesterday that there is a nightly winter illumination show, and it starts from 6PM. The show repeats every 15 minutes and features

Day 14 today was originally planned for our snowshoe hike trip. But the guide we engaged alerted us a few days ago that snowfall in the area was lower than expected this week, so the missus asked if he could

While Central Nikko itself was a pretty sedate small town, we were loath to check out of Stay Nikko Guesthouse. Despite it not having the modern conveniences of numerous restaurants and cafes right at our doorstep — i.e. like at