The longest day but back in America

January 18, 2024

Today will be today for 38 hours or so. We awoke in Tokyo on Thursday, January 18th. We had a final breakfast at a Japanese hotel and then set off for a few hours in Tokyo.

This time we were near Tokyo station which has a much more business feel.

Tokyo buildings

Our final tourist visit was to the Imperial Palace. There is a tour they run twice a day of the inside grounds of the palace. We got reservations earlier. It is a 90 minute tour and was pretty interesting. Stuff you cannot see all the time.

The Imperial Pointer stick

After our orientation we set out. They had guides for Japanese, English, French, Spanish, and Chinese. We went with English but did debate joining the smaller Spanish group.

Imperial lanyards and we are off

The former castle was destroyed and never rebuilt because they decided it was not needed as a fortification due to the peace of the Edo period. The palace burned during the bombing of WWII. So while the origins of the palace grounds go way back, the current iteration has a lot of modern with a mix of historical buildings.

Sculpture that evokes young pine trees
Current palace and grounds for gatherings
Old defense tower
Standing on the second bridge for the main gate and looking at the first (nicknamed the ‘eyeglass’ bridge)
New and old on the palace grounds
Cherry blossom that blooms for months

Overall it was a nice tour and we got to see various things other do not see like the Imperial gas station.

Imperial gas station smelled strongly of gas…

From there we wandered back to Tokyo station.

Cleaning the line needles out do the moat
A single swan making sure they get all the pine needles
Tokyo station is the first one that looks like a historic station

We checked out the character street shopping. The stores for all sorts of Japanese show characters. I am really behind as I did not recognize most of them. Closing the trip with some shopping was fitting because every tour recommendation including shopping.

We boarded our last train for the airport.

On the Narita Express

At the airport we hung out and then boarded our flight at about 8 pm on January 18th.

Until next time Japan!
Heading toward the plane
Our surprise continued all the way to boarding – Owen was first on the plane.
Ready to take off

As we complete our journey around the world, we went back through Honolulu.

When we landed it was tomorrow in Japan but we rewound time back to 7 am on the 18th.

1:46 AM in Japan when we land
Rewind to 7AM

It was also funny because all of our east coast family was not living in the future. Time zones are weird and the international dateline is the weirdest of them all.

We spent a few hour in Hawaii and touched the Pacific again.

Enjoying Hawaii briefly

Then we made it back to the mainland at 10 pm about 38 hours after the start of January 18th and on to home.

The trip has been great and we both had a lot of fun. We saw new parts of the world. We had some great good luck things and things that we will need to come back for another time. Glad to be home.

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