It starts my only stories while feeling a romantic wind

This weekend we took a deep breath and bought two plane tickets to Japan. We had a huge wad of airmiles burning a hole in our pocket and thought that now is as good a time as any. I feel irresponsible and guilty, but we will probably never have 'enough' disposable income to make a vacation like this financially sensible.

In October we will be travelling to visit our friend Dave, who has been living in Fukuyama for a couple of years. The trip will be two and a half weeks, so we plan on using rail passes to zip around and see as much as we can. It looks so small on the world map, but there is still far too much to see in such a short time. It'll be hard to pare things down.

Today I went to the library and took out some travel guides. Now I will start 3 months of intense absorption of everything japanese!

I hope I don't bore you all to tears with incessant blathering about nothing else. Please tell me if I do.