My Flight to Japan was a Nightmare

Before I get into travel day of this trip, I want to lay out the exposition. I am traveling with 2 of my friends and we are supposed to be visiting 9 different cities in Japan. The idea is to start from the top in Sapporo and make our way to the bottom, Okinawa. In between these 2 cities, we will be stopping at Aomori, Sendai, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, and Fukuoka. This is a month long trip that I have planned for 2 months just figuring all the details needed for this to happen. With all of that out of the way, let the story begin. I am with my 2 travel partners, Chuck and Isa staying at my friend’s house, Adam, near LAX. We all woke up at 5:00 AM and our flight leaves at 11:30. We wanted to get there early because LAX is a very busy airport and we were fairly new to this international travel thing. I also made a huge mistake when ordering our plane tickets and spelled one of my friend’s name wrong. Luckily this wasn’t a huge deal at all and we ended up getting through security and to our gate before before 6:00. We were all extremely excited for this trip, but I don’t believe anyone was more excited than me. Throughout the whole lead up to the trip, I was stressing out over finishing a video for a client and planning this month long trip not knowing what we were getting ourselves into. I did hours and hours of research because the last place you want to mess up is in another country. The major contributing factors to the success of this trip were Hopper, TripAdvisor, Google maps, and Airbnb. Hopper allowed me to book multi-city flights all in one go and showed me the best deals for each flight and what days were the best for prices which made picking out days. Since we would be flying a total of 6 times, including the layover in Tokyo on our way to Sapporo, Hopper was the ultimate convenience. TripAdvisor on the other hand was convenient for planning different locations in different cities and booking tours. I would go through and choose different activities, landmarks, and other things and save them in a spreadsheet, from there I would search these locations up on google maps and save them in a dedicated folder for each city that those activities were in, then I would map out and choose the best walking routes and write those down in the spreadsheet in order so that I could come back to that and plug it into google maps when we were going to visit. Now… back to the travel day haha. We got on board, 12 hours of hell later, we land in Tokyo and this is where the problems started. Navigating through Haneda Airport was fairly easy, our first stop was customs which was fairly easy then we had to take a bus to our terminal, got through security, but i was stopped so they could take my portable battery pack and my tripod. With such a short layover and the long way to the terminal, and being held back by security, we made it on the plane with 5 minutes to spare. I had no Idea what I was doing this whole process, but I winged it and it worked out fairly easily… kinda haha. Our next flight was to Sapporo and that was a quick one. We landed in New Chitose Airport, grabbed our sim cards from a sim card vending machine, took the 1 hour train to Sapporo Station, taxi’d to the airbnb, and checked into our Airbnb by 9:00PM, the 30th of October. I decided to take a quick shower which actually was another painful experience because one thing I didn’t know when going to Japan is that they have little thermostat devices connected to their water that controls the temperature. If you go to Japan and stay in an airbnb, you will most likely every time need to turn on the hot water before hopping in for a nice warm shower. I didn’t find this out until the 11th day of the trip, but that will be another story. Long day, but we finally fall asleep awaiting our first actual day of Japan. Major lessons I learned from this travel day was that I Japan has strict security measures for flights and that you should keep everything possible inside your luggage. I traveled with 2 backpacks and since my tripod was on the outside, it didn’t make it through. Also, I technically didn’t need a sim card because e-sims exist and you can also use a international plan depending on your phone service. If you have any questions regarding this trip, feel free to leave a comment and I will try my best to help and to those who read this, thank you very much. Stay tuned for where the true journey begins.