When planning this part of our trip, Chad and I wanted a short stay to bridge Hakone and Kyoto so we could avoid being in Kyoto on the weekend. Kyoto seems to be crowded any day of the week – it’s an extremely popular destination. But weeknights were definitely cheaper for our Airbnb and it…

Chad and I flew from Hanoi back to Japan in mid-April and spent a few days in Tokyo, which I’ll discuss in a future post when we make our last trip to Tokyo for this leg for Chad’s birthday at the end of May. When planning the leg, we wanted to take some time between…

Today marks the halfway point of our 30 days in Osaka, so I’m taking a step away from posting chronologically to record our experience thus far. But I promise to post about Tokyo, Hakone, Atami, and Kyoto, all of which we visited between Hanoi and here, in the next few weeks. We loved our time…

The last of our four two-week stays in Vietnam was in Hanoi, where we actually stayed for 17 days. Although we didn’t like Hanoi as much as Da Nang, our favorite, we still had a great time and a great quality of life. Though there were still plenty of motorbikes, there were also functioning traffic…

In addition to Ha Long Bay, our other overnight trip from Hanoi was to Sa Pa. This was a very different kind of trip and not even on my radar before we arrived in Vietnam. But I kept seeing people mention Sa Pa online and after a little research, it seemed perfect for us. Sa…