Cannot believe this trip is finally starting! Was there ever a trip more anticipated? And I worried about that a lot, you don’t want your expectations to be dashed, and the 2023 trip was about as prefect as you could get. Well, minus some nights on the floor, nonstop rain, etc haha but it was an awfully high bar and I worried this year we’d end up disappointed by comparison. (Narrator: not to worry!)
I of course started (in the dark) from Cincinnati, Robert even earlier from Denver, then Matt was due in the early evening arriving from Boston. The plan was for the three of us to meet at Gibson’s for an amazing kick-off steak dinner, then fly to Japan the next day.
It was sad being here by myself but there was no way Sam (my wife) was going to cope with all our crazy Japanese meals. But she’d been there before, she knew what she was “missing.” So after dropping me off at CVG in the early morning, she continued down to Kentucky to visit her dad and his newly-acquired 18-pound brisket.
So I finally land in ORD, a bit early–not good! In Chicago it’s never wise to miss your expected landing time either early or late. We taxi around for quite a while, going slower and slower, and finally we stop, pretty much in Egypt by this point. The captain pipes up, “hopefully we’ll be on our way soon,” as he turns off the fasten seatbelt sign. As it happens, Robert has also been endlessly taxiing around ORD! He’s lucky to be here, having overslept his alarm by forty-five minutes. We were texting and simply agreed that whoever made it to his gate first would meet the other and the trip would finally properly begin.
To make a long story short, Robert ended up finding me at my gate; we followed the signs for trains into the city, and bought our five-dollar tickets to get downtown. This was simple: the instructions were still all in English! 😀
Robert led us to a very, very hip coffee shop he knew of, and we ordered two coffees: one for six and a half bucks, the other for $24 lol
The train downtown took forever, so it was pretty much lunchtime by now, and there just happened to be an amazing French restaurant within walking distance–and even better, it was on the way to our videogame barcade!
After our eau de vies (hey how often do we get to eat at a legit French place) we took off for the Field Museum. Last time we’d been there was like the second after Covid opened up, we were literally two of six people that day when it finally re-opened! Today wasn’t much more crowded actually, so we sauntered around checking out Egyptian stuff and then the dinosaurs of course 😀
Tired out, we grabbed an Uber to the local Barcade where we played a ludicrous ancient Micheal Jackson video game: one button was “shoot” and another was “dance,” the point of the game was for Micheal to release small children out of cages (really!) and it just went downhill from there haha
Turns out that we’d gotten our times mixed up, and Matt ended up landing in Chicago early than we’d expected so we had to leave our games, run and grab an Uber to the O’Hare Loews… rush hour traffic on a Friday afternoon defeats the idea of getting out of downtown quickly, so we finally met up with Matthew fairly late that afternoon. But he’d been happily cooling his heels at the Loews hotel bar, wearing his Boston Red Sox jersey with a mojito in his hand. Despite us being late, it was a merry meeting!
Unfortunately I have very few photos from where we headed next: Gibsons!! Suffice it to say it was as awesome as usual: Plymouth gin martinis and everything! Along with the day’s second creme broulet haha what a way to start the trip
The next day, Saturday, we had a 7:30 alarm and a flight at 11:50AM.
Eventually we landed at Narita, so it was immigration, customs, QR codes used & accepted, finger printing, facial recognition scans, body-temperature scans… and after all that, it was back through airport security because we were not stopping in Tokyo, we were continuing on up to Sapporo. That first day’s travel was a bitch but it was worth it to just plow through and get all the flights over and done with.
We got to the ANA Crowne Plaza by a combo of a trains to the main Sapporo station, then a brisk ten-block walk. I think it’s safe to say that I was about as tired then as I’d ever been. We checked in, got settled a bit, then around 9:00PM or so we headed out to “dinner” at a highly recommended Japanese dumpling place.
Our confusingly-timed feast, at least 30 dumplings, edamame, some weird appetizer, the raw horse (!!), two mysterious “hydrating water” thingies, and six beers: $65!! No tip of course!
We all stumbled back to the hotel to collapse… perhaps Sumo was watched, I just can’t remember. What time was it anyway? After 11:00PM local time, no freaking clue what our time “really” was lol wow what a first travel day! Mission accomplished!
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