We’ve finally reached the final post of our Taiwan & Japan travels from this winter! Rewinding a bit from the Japan portion of our tour, we circle back to January first, in Taipei. After having watched the famous Taipei 101 fireworks the night before from our friends’ place out on the west side, we ventured…
Tokyo! After a whirlwind eight days visiting four other places in Japan, we finally reached its biggest city, Tokyo. We stayed for five nights in Ginza, a nice, relatively quiet commercial district filled with luxury brands and nice hotels and restaurants. Alex had made a reservation ahead of time, so after checking in to the…
From our lovely stay in Kyoto, we continued eastward, where we made the train-equivalent of an extended layover in Nagoya en route to Tokyo. My friend Julianne happens to be living in Nagoya for two years, so we took the opportunity to do a one-night stay to say hello and even do some laundry! Our…
Halfway through our Japan trip, we had such a lovely time in Kyoto. It’s quite the darling of Japanese cities, as we enjoyed plenty of its historical attractions, food, shopping, and even some nature. Anchoring it all was our stay at the Ace Hotel Kyoto. Something about this West Coast American (from Portland) property in…
From the quiet, meditative spaces of the art islands, we traveled straight into the center of the chaos when we took a shinkansen into Osaka. The trains were all nearly full, as it seems like everyone else was also going back to the big city after their New Year’s breaks. We spent only two nights…
I first heard of Japan’s art islands when my friends visited a couple years ago and declared it their favorite place in the entire world. The islands of Naoshima and Teshima are set in the Inland Sea, west of Osaka. They require at minimum a train and a ferry– half a day’s travel– to reach,…
We flew out on Christmas night, skipping over the 26th and arriving the morning of the 27th in Taipei. I hadn’t been to Taiwan since before the pandemic, and Alex hadn’t been in a decade. This would be our first Asia trip together! After dropping off our luggage at the hotel in Gongguan, we then…
2024 was a very full year, packed with adventures near and far and projects large and small. We traveled to Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos, New Mexico for a ski trip in February. We visited Tampa Bay and Miami for baseball stadiums number 25 and 26 in April and Kansas City for the 27th in September….
Second Thanksgiving has been an annual tradition with the Yaus since 2011. It happens the Saturday after Thanksgiving, with a full new Thanksgiving feast (not leftovers– that’s for Sunday) and an ever-expanding group of friends and their little ones in attendance. For me it has become a signpost, marking the years with a trek down…
Back in September, Alex and I flew over to Kansas City for a long weekend, following our San Francisco Giants over to Kauffman Stadium and checking off another MLB Ballpark from Alex’s list. We also visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and of course we ate some barbecue. Perhaps more unexpectedly we also saw a…
Labor Day is a great time to visit New York City, especially if you like the city relatively quiet and empty! Alex and I were able to spend two whole weeks in New York thanks to the generosity of friends who let us stay in their place on the Upper West Side while they were…
Our good friends Do-Hee and Josh up and left the San Francisco city life in 2022 and moved to upstate New York to start a farm! This was our second year in a row visiting them at Vernon Street Farm. This time we flew in for a stay in Manhattan for the week before and…