On our last trip to Japan, my husband had an ACL injury and I wanted to make sure the hotels we booked were close to all the things we wanted to visit so he didn’t have to walk too far. In the past we have stayed in Tokyo in Shibuya at the Hotel Century Souther […]
Family travel is always unpredictable and some of our favorite trip memories come from times when things don’t go as we expected. On a recent trip to Asia I was really excited about all the fun restaurants we’d get to see! I was really intrigued about one called Dim Sum Icon, a cafe that I saw on […]
When we first found this rooftop playground in Tokyo a couple years ago the boys’ eyes lit up like firecrackers and if we had enough 100 yen coins we could have entertained them for hours. Of course we looked for more magic of this sort when we returned. And we found a few fabulous ones. […]
Fukuyama would never have been on my radar if it didn’t have a Shinkansen that would take us back to Tokyo after visiting my relatives in Kochi on Shikoku Island in Japan (about 3.5 hours). The Anchor Hotel looked like a cool place to stay and Fukuyama seemed like the best place to stop at […]
We’ve traveled to Tokyo several times with our kids over the years but Japan travel has changed a ton since pre-2020. We finally made it back this August as part of a trip to see family in Singapore and the south of Japan and it turned out that this kind of trip with teenagers is […]
My prior knowledge of the Ghibli Museum was only that it had to do with the movies Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. I’m not even sure if I actually ever watched Totoro or just bought a lot of Totoro things when I was a little kid and I’m still not exactly sure what a […]
If you are traveling from Seattle, flying to Tokyo is usually about a nine hour flight-I like to justify a family trip to Tokyo to travelers with kids by saying it’s just a few hours more than a flight to Hawaii which is a very popular destination for families in the Pacific Northwest. And because […]
Are you thinking of traveling to Japan? There are a few airlines that currently fly directly to Tokyo from Seattle like Delta and ANA and flying to Tokyo is only about an 11 hour flight from Seattle. In the time it takes to fly there, you can watch about 4 movies, have a quick nap, […]
In another life, the only car I could have reliably named on the road was a Volkswagon Beetle but my husband has managed to pass on his passion for vehicles down to the next generation and now if I DON’T know the cars around me, I’d be totally outnumbered in the family. So I try […]
We have been back from our trip to Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo for over a month and with the end of school and all our other summer planning, I’m only now getting to the posts. There are many amazing things to see in Tokyo with kids, but the one thing my guys have always talked about […]
Waking up to sun in my eyes this Monday was definitely not the worst thing in the world, but Monday is Monday and after a weekend of hiking, good food, indulging and friends, it was still a little hard to wake up. Luckily for us in Seattle, there are many fabulous things to look forward […]
It might be my fault that I’ve had to buy one of my guys a sumo costume. It started with a book we read. And then he decided that he’d like to see Sumo in real life. (And if you’re in Tokyo in January, May or September, you’re definitely in luck.) I thought we might […]
If you talk and walk with me, I could go miles and not have any idea where I’m heading or where we’ve been so use this loosely as a guide and plot your own route on a map. We had a plan for a day in Tokyo and it consisted of these 4 places: 1) […]
I’ve read everywhere that once you land in another time zone you just have to embrace it. We arrived in Tokyo around 6 pm and we were all exhausted so we grabbed a light dinner and put the kids to bed around their regular time. And then they woke up around 3 am. We were […]
As much as I want to know about where to eat, where to sleep and what to do when we go on vacation, I totally also need to know where to take the kids when they need to go! We were in the midst of toilet-training when we first took the boys to Asia and […]
I read about the National Children’s Castle in this book about Kid’s Trips in Tokyo, (a little-bit outdated guide from 1996 but useful nonetheless) and it sounded very cool, kind of like the kids’ museums we have in Seattle. Don’t mistake it for the Tokyo Metropolitan Children’s Hall. That one is currently closed until at […]
Trip planning without kids can be a challenge when you’re going somewhere new and I vehemently believe there is never a ‘best time” to travel with kids so we try to embrace ALL The times as much as we can. Here are some of the places we’ve traveled with the duo and the sites and […]
The boys recently got hooked on the book I Can Read with My Eyes Shut, by Dr. Seuss and in it the big cat explains to the little cat, “the more that you read, the more you will know and the more that you learn the more places you will go.” I hope if we can […]
I am not a good flyer. We travel a lot and I’m always reminding the hubby that the journey might be just as fun as the destination, but the only place I can’t do this is on an airplane. And since having withstood about 70 days of hospital bedrest ( I wonder if NASA could […]
I’ll have to admit, I was a little scared taking two newly toilet trained boys to Asia. Were we going to have to revert back to diapers? Would it be a giant poo disaster everyday? I was so thankful to find that the places we visited in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo were even more […]