“Come, Watson, come!’ he cried. ‘The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!’
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes
Ten minutes later we were both in a cab and rattling through the silent streets on our way to Charing Cross Station.”
For us, travel has rarely been a spur of the moment thing, usually requiring weeks, months, or even years of planning. We used to have to schedule our trips around annual vacations, now we schedule them around prescription renewals! But at least the travel game is still afoot, albeit at a more relaxed pace than that of Holmes and Watson.
The paragraph below was written in 2023 when we were sure that we’d be visiting Japan again within months. But it appears that there is such a thing as planning too far ahead since some happy family changes have caused us to postpone this trip until 2025. Watch for Posts with further updates!
It has been six years since our first trip to Japan, which was a very brief visit to the Kyoto and Nara area. We were very lucky to time that trip for cherry blossom season, although as you can see from the feature image, by the end of the trip there were more blossoms on the ground than on the trees! Ever since that first trip we have planned to go back to see Tokyo and some of the other sights. And in 2024 we are planning to return. Dates completely unknown at this time, but it’s unlikely that we’ll be there for cherry blossom time.
There is another country in northern Asia that we have never visited, Korea, and if we can we’ll spend some time there too on this trip.
Of course there are two Koreas, and both South Korea (known as Republic of Korea) and North Korea (known as Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ) are members of the United Nations. See the complete list of UN members in the Countries Visited section of our Trips page. It seems unlikely that we’ll get to North Korea any time soon, so it’s only South Korea that we plan to visit on this trip.
Korea has its own cherry blossom season, so important that the government department Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) has forecasting the cherry blossom season in its mandate. That’s a tough job! As a result of climate change, the cherry blossoms in 2021 and 2023 were the earliest ever recorded. So we’d be really lucky to time it correctly, and may not even try.
We’ve had plans, and even tickets, for Korea before. Just one of many trips that we cancelled due to COVID. We actually had two separate sets of plane tickets for Korea when the pandemic began in 2020, when we stubbornly refused to admit that a virus could upend travel as it did. Third time is a charm!
