As those of you following me for a long time may know, back in 2007 after the Yokohama Worldcon, Lisa and I spent two weeks traveling around Japan, and among the things we did was the Seikan Tunnel Tour. This is one of the things I would have included in a "Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't" meme had I decided to try and create one. (travelswithkuma ( Read more... )

Thanks to Lisa'a friend Scott for passing on this picture of a malfunctioning JR train -- at least, one of the comments says that it's a Chou-Sobu line train, which means there's a chance Lisa and I rode on it during our Japan trip when we went to Chiba, where we stopped and rode the monorail, then went on to Choshi and the Choshi Electric RailwayI ( Read more... )

Briefly checking in from PDX here... While I was at OAK, I got a call from the Fremont Argus telling me that they wanted to use my letter, but it's too long -- there's a 200-word limit. So I talked to one of their people and we managed to trim enough words to bring it under spec. We dropped the "15 minute stops" paragraph entirely (as I expected ( Read more... )

Boarding for our flight begins in about fifteen minutes, so I will be shortly shutting down here. As we'll be going back to Mehama from PDX after we arrive Tuesday morning (it's Tuesday afternoon here in Japan as I type this), I may not get back on line until Wednesday morning Oregon time, the internet access being at my father-in-law's house ( Read more... )

As requested, we got over to the airport more than three hours early. Flying World Business Class means we get the priority check-in area, and only the minimum necessary wait time. Here at Narita, there are procedures that I'd never encountered before. To enter the airport complex, you must show your passport, whether coming by road (like in a ( Read more... )

We've had way too much to eat at the breakfast buffet, so we're finishing packing and will go for a walk for half an hour or so before checking out and taking our mountain of luggage with us down to the shuttle bus for the airport. We should be at the airport about three hours early, so it's likely I'll get one more chance to check in from the ( Read more... )

Originally our plans called for us to fly NRT-HNL-SEA-PDX starting last night, arriving just before midnight after a marathon series of flights and spending the night at the PDX Sheraton. Now we'll be flying directly and arriving 0805 -- about eight hours after we were originally scheduled to arrive. I've canceled the hotel reservation (thank ( Read more... )

I've posted a back-dated entry about our trip to Chiba to ride the monorail there today and about wringing as much value out of the Japan Rail Pass as we possibly could. It's just gone Midnight here, so our three weeks of train travel are now officially over. Of course, originally we would have been part-way across the Pacific by now, but instead ( Read more... )

When Lisa and I arrived to check in for our 20:55 flight this evening (having arrived 2 1/2 hours early), they asked for volunteers to be bumped. I reckoned that I could, at worst, just take another day off from work and they'd understand, and asked for more details. They said there was nothing tonight on which they could send us as an ( Read more... )

After checking out of the Holiday Inn, we took our bags over to Narita and put them in storage for the day. Then we caught a Narita Rapid train (Green car available, unreserved) out to Chiba, eating our bento boxes and finally getting to see the Narita Airport railway line in daylight. At Chiba, we boarded the Chiba Monorail, buying a minimum ( Read more... )