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…
On Christmas Day we flew from Maui over to Oahu for part two of our Hawaii vacation. We stayed with our friends Crystal and Chris near Diamond Head and circled the whole island seeing the beautiful sights and eating all the delicious things. This was my first time on Oahu, and I would definitely come…
We originally thought about visiting Hawaii over the holidays because flights were pretty reasonable. However, as soon as we looked for housing between Christmas and New Year’s we realized the only options left were $10,000/night. So we made alternate plans to visit West Texas instead. But as soon as we did, Alex’s friends Chris and…
After hours of delayed flights from Melbourne, we finally reached Sydney, Australia! This was the whole inspiration for the Australia trip: to visit Tiffany and Greg who had moved to Sydney half a year prior, and of course Howard, whose wedding was the reason I visited in 2016. Our friend Tim had also just moved…
Melbourne! I first visited Melbourne three years prior on our whirlwind tour through New Zealand and Australia. My time in Melbourne was brief but wonderful. This time, visiting Australia with Alex, we had different work schedules which meant that he arrived in Melbourne three days before me, we then took off for our road trip…
My great Thanksgiving adventure this year was a jaunt around Australia. We started in Melbourne, and from there rented a car to take a road trip along the Great Ocean Road, Australia’s analog to our Pacific Coast Highway in California, although perhaps a more concentrated version with epic landscapes along this 150-mile stretch. Our overall…