As most of you know from watching my videos, reading my blog and following me on Facebook I am taking a trip to Tokyo here in the next few weeks. This trip is going to be a lot of fun because not only am I going on a trip but I am going to be meeting my mom there who I have not spent time with one on one for over 20 years. Of course this is incredibly exciting to me and so I want to ensure that everything goes as well as possible which means that there has been a lot of preparation to ensure that everything goes well.
This is not my first trip to Tokyo and therefore it is important to me personally to try and improve on the last trip that I took. I would not say that my first trip to Tokyo was a failure but there were a number of things that I could have done better to make a better overall trip. This involved myself as well as my hubby Rusty sitting down and talking about what we think didn't do right and therefore making the odds of this trip being good would be better. In this post I am going to go over the things that we talked about and therefore hopefully you can find yourself having a better experience if you want to go to Tokyo.
The first thing that we did was determine what it was that we were going to Tokyo for. What is it that is going to be the main focus of our trip when we arrive in Tokyo? For us this was really simple. My mother and I both very much love Disney and therefore it was a no brainier that we would be spending most of our time in Disneyland and Disney Sea. Once this decision was made, which was a quick one, we had to determine where we wanted to stay. For us this was again a no brainer. My mother is a member of the Disney Vacation Club and as we were spending time in Tokyo Disney it was perfect to stay in one of the resident hotels. Once that was done it was time to book a flight. Of course this is something that you could can do by taking a number of routes. Here in Okinawa there are various places where you can get flights booked. If you have access to the military bases there are travel agents there who can assist you or if you can find travel agents out in town as well. If you are like me you like to stay away from the travel agencies and go ahead and find a flight on your own. This is the best way to get the best rate on a flight. For me I found myself finding an airline which was just string flights from Okinawa. This allowed me to get a stellar flight for a great price. Of course with some of the discount airlines you might find yourself having to make adjustments. For me the adjustment I needed to make was flying out a day early. If course this required me to find a hotel room for the day but luckily the flight was so inexpensive that I was capable of saving $100+ even after booking the flights and hotel.
When it comes to booking a hotel there are some more tips that I can offer. The important thing here is again do your research. One of the things that I have found myself doing is using Yahoo rather than using Google. There are tons of resources online where you can find information regarding hotels. Booking is also really simple and can in most cases be done in English so don't fear. Of course if you are to go this route make sure that everything is printed out and that you have all of your information readily accessible to ensure you are ready to go during check in.
Now that all of this is taken care of it's time to start thinking about the other more in depth elements of your trip. Planning what you want to do is extremely important when traveling to Tokyo. Although I am a huge fan of just going with the flow you can find yourself missing out quite a bit if you do this during your time in the city. I often compare Tokyo not to traveling to a city in fact but rather like traveling to a state. You wouldn't just go to Massachusetts and say "let's walk around and see what happens". For this reason it is important in my opinion to ensure that you know where you want to go and what you want to do. This will ensure that you also have a plan on how to get yourself to those places and therefore you will loose less time than if you were to try and figure out how to get from here to there with the train system. To make sure that you can do this I always advise to have a map of the trains and subways. Of course these are available in the stations but it is also good to ensure that you can look closely before you get to the point where you need to buy a ticket. It is also helpful to look at these maps and such before you get to the station so maybe over lunch or before you leave the hotel for the day. I found this extremely helpful when I had gone to Tokyo the first time. Of course there is a good chance that I looked like a looser but I was never lost so that's a plus. Let me talk for a moment about the planning. Having been to Tokyo before I had an idea of what it would be like but my mother having never been to Tokyo it was different hearing what she had wanted to do and what I had experienced would be possible during the trip. My mom being an avid Travel Channel viewer she had plans of seeing Tokyo the way that you see it in the travel shows. She had seen Samantha Brown travel as well as Andrew Zimmerman and had wanted to do a number of the things that they do when they do their shows in Tokyo. Of course this was something we could have definitely accomplished but at the same time there was no focus. She had wanted to try street food and go to a theme restaurant and so from what I had experienced in the past it was important to make a plan on what exactly she wanted out of the trip. Street food was not something that I had seen in Tokyo during the time that I was there so I honestly am not sure where we would go to get something like that but nonetheless there were other areas that I could cover. The theme restaurant that my mother had experienced was the one which was on an episode of Bizarre foods. This one in particular was one that had some . . . . . questionable items on the menu. In fact I am not sure that I would want to go there myself and certainly not with my mom. I talked to her about it too and she agreed that she would like to go to a place a little more. . . cute rather than something scary and gross for a lack of a better word. The simplest answer for this in my opinion is going to a Maid Cafe. I searched around for a few and finally found one that was popular and touristy which means it has information online and english menu so that was very helpful. The other thing that my mom wanted to do was try something strange and interesting so I am planning on heading to Sunshine City and Ice Cream City. Here they have a variety of different ice creams that are unimaginable like chicken wing and squid ink. This is a must do during our trip and therefore another place that we wanted to make sure we put on the itinerary. The final part of the trip is going to be spent at Disney so that is extremely simple to plan especially because we will be just a 10 minute walk from the park itself. I could make an entire post just talking about Disney travel tips and tricks which I might end up doing for you in the near future but nonetheless this part of the trip is very planned out also. Everything from finding exactly what they serve at various locations to making sure that we can get on all the rides we want to it's going to be a lot of fun but took a lot of planning.
There are also so many other things that I have done to try and accommodate for my mom and ensure that this trip is one of the best ever. I was going to write more about that in this post but I think that to be honest it will be better if I go ahead and just post different posts to make it a bit more comprehensive and readable. So keep an eye on the blog and VLOG for more information about traveling to Tokyo.
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