We have our tickets bought! Which is exciting, but made me realize it’s worth going into a little more detail about our pre-Japan plans, and when we’ll be where. So here are the actual dates!
- Florida: Present-July 4th
- Virginia: July 4th-August 13th
- California: August 13th-September 8th
- Hawaii: September 8th-September 13th
- Japan: September 14th1-December 10th
- Hawaii: December 10th-???
The final bit in Hawaii may get changed, though, depending on how the visa process in Japan goes. We’re expecting to have to spend some time outside the country in between our visitor visas expiring and our residency visas kicking in, but if that’s a short enough gap, we may stay in Asia, and just spend some time in South Korea or Vietnam or something.
So why are we doing this? A couple reasons. The most pragmatic is breaking up the travel woes. As much as Cassie and I both love traveling to other places, we hate traveling to other places. By breaking the trip up across several jaunts, we’re breaking up what would be a 17 hour flight into several smaller flights – as unpleasant as going through airports can be, sitting on a plane for an entire day is worse.
We also get to adapt to the new time zone in pieces, instead of all at once; Japan is 13 hours ahead of Florida, which we expect to lead to some pretty brutal jet lag even with our stops.
But of course, neither of those are reason enough to spend months in VA and CA, so obviously the big reason is to see friends and family before we go; even if we do come back between visas, it’ll be around Christmas and we won’t want to do a ton of traveling then, so this will be like our goodbye tour.
So if you’re anywhere near us at any part of our travels, please reach out; we’d love to see you before we go!
- We lose a day in travel. ↩︎