From Las Vegas, we headed back to the coast, to the city of Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is a small city about 90 miles North of LA and is described as the American Riviera due to its climate and well off population. We stayed at the Simpson House Inn bed and breakfast, a converted house […]
After the awe inspiring scenery of the Grand Canyon, it was time for a complete change as we headed to Las Vegas. Dean had been last year for his stag do and declared it his favourite place in the world and that he plans to go every year so I was excited to see what […]
Having recharged in LA, it was time to head East. Before leaving LA, we needed lunch so parked up near the freeway entrance and as it was raining ran into the nearest place. We saw plenty we liked the look of on the menu so placed our orders. It turned out we were in a […]
After a busy few weeks in Japan, we scheduled a few quiet days in LA to get over the jet-lag. LA is 15 hours behind Tokyo so we went back in time during the flight, leaving Wednesday evening and arriving Wednesday morning! For the first four nights, we stayed at Venice Beach, renting an apartment […]
We had three more nights in Tokyo before it was time to leave Japan. Having previously stayed in Shinjuku, this time we stayed in Ginza in the East of the city. Ginza is one of Tokyo’s shopping districts so there was lots in the area which was handy.
We found it difficult to book hotels for the weekend at short notice in any of the towns we fancied visiting so our last three nights before heading back to Tokyo were spent in three different hotels, with lots of train journeys in between.
Having heard that just North of Nagasaki there is a whole theme park based on Holland, we couldn’t resist a peak – it sounded too bizarre to be true. Bizarre it definitely is. Apparently they even imported the bricks for the buildings from the Netherlands.
Next on our Japan itinerary was a few days in Nagasaki on the island of Kyushu (so far we’d been on Honshu island). Like Hiroshima, Nagasaki is pretty famous for being bombed, but we found there was a lot more to the city. We didn’t actually visit any of the A-bomb memorial sites here.
Seoul is another destination that wasn’t on our original itinerary, but Dean is trying to close the gap on the countries we’ve each visited so as in Japan we were only a 1 hour flight away, we decided to pop over for the weekend.
Okunoshima is a small island in the Japanese inland sea which we visited for a day from Hiroshima. During WW2, it was chosen as the site for the Japanese army to develop chemical weapons and huge amounts of mustard gas and tear gas were produced here. That’s not why we went though. We went because […]
Unfortunately everyone has heard of Hiroshima due to the atomic bomb ‘Little Boy’ that was dropped here on 6th August 1945. There is of course more to the city, an art museum, castle and a great network of riverside parks and paths. It’s also a great city to base yourself in for various daytrips, but […]
We visited Nara, another former capital, as a day trip from Osaka. It’s a bit closer to Kyoto but as Nara is all about temples, we decided we needed a break between temple visiting in Kyoto and Nara.
