Japan Day 1- Arrival

In March we figured out that all 5 of us were going to have 2 weeks of time at the end of July to go on a family trip together. Since Lily’s senior trip involved mountain climbing, Matt felt that Melanie’s senior trip should also include scaling a mountain. Thus Japan and Mt. Fuji were chosen as the the place to go. It also helped that none of us have been to Japan, we all like the food, and anime and Japanese culture in general have been a go-to for us. Once we announced our plan to go in July, Moody and Jo expressed their wish to go to Japan and asked if they could tag along. Thus our Japan team of 7 was formed. We had a head-start in planning for the trip by playing a boardgame called Let’s Go to Japan, that Moody and Jo found. We each got practice planning are own Toyko/Kyoto trip to score the most points. More on this later.

We took off on Wednesday July 15th from MSP at a respectable hour of 10:40am. Belinda had upgraded the whole family up to business class which allowed us access to the Delta lounge, so we had a nice space to wait and eat some breakfast before getting on the plane. It took 12.5 hours on a direct flight to Tokyo Haneda airport. None of us really slept very much, unexpectedly there were a lot of small children in business class. Parents must have found the same deal to upgrade that Belinda did.

We arrived ahead of Moody and Jo by about 2 hours. We found the Suica card(public transport pass) easily and jumped on the Monorail as planned, but it end up being a 25 min walk to the hotel in our first taste of Japan summer heat and humidity. Not the first time Belinda has lead the family on a death march with suitcases. At least this time we were able to warn Moody and Jo to take a double subway instead.

While we were waiting for Moody and Jo, the Cordinas minus Charles went shopping at Uniqlo!

In an effort to stay awake until a normal bedtime we headed over to Odaiba district to grab some dinner of Tsukemen(dipping noodle ramen), the Unicorn Gundam(giant transformer robot that has a show every 30 min), and the AquaSymphony water show.