Planning My Best Friend's First Trip Abroad

I first met Taylor in High-School. It was my first day at a brand new school. I knew nobody. I was the new kid. So, I made it a point to make my first friend in my first class of the day. Orchestra. Yes, I was an orchdork.

I remember finding my seat in the cello section, turning to the person next to me, looking him dead in the eye and saying "you and I are best friends now".

That fact has never changed.

As we got to know each other, we realized we had so many things in common. We both loved video games, manga, and anime. Truly a match made in heaven. We made it our goal to one day travel to the holy land (Japan) together, and have the experience of a lifetime. We were just 14 year olds with big dreams.

Fast forward more than a decade later, and it's actually happening! Who woulda thunk it?

So for the first post of this new blog, I'm going to talk about the planning process for our trip together. Let's do it!

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Step 1: Choosing The Dates

The first step in our journey was to figure out when to travel. For me, it's always easiest to go broad and then narrow it down. We both agreed that early spring would be the best time of year for the both of us, so that left us with a good time frame. Since my birthday is in early spring, we decided to plan our trip for the beginning of March.

10 days of bliss.

Step 2: Planning The Route

The next step would be to find out where we would go. Which is so easy. Obviously we go to Tokyo!

Wait...Japan is more than just Tokyo?

Yes dear readers, Japan is certainly more than just Tokyo. So, we had to decide which regions of Japan we wanted to visit on our first trip together and in what order.

We decided to make a quick pit stop in Seoul, South Korea to drop off my dog Isabelle with Tina (more on that story in a future post). From Seoul, we would fly out to the Kansai region and end our trip in the Kanto region.

Step 3: Research Research Research

Now.... to figure out what things we wanted to do, see, and eat.

Since Taylor has never traveled outside of the country (no a cruise doesn't count), he wasn't sure exactly what he wanted. But, he knew two things......

1. eat amazing food

2. anime

Easy.

Since it's not my first rodeo, I already knew where I wanted to take him. But, it was fun getting together and doing more research on things that I've never done nor heard of. Like, did you know that there's a cup noodle museum in Osaka? With FREE admission? That's amazing. We're going there.

A big part of the research process was finding out where things were, what times they were open, how much things would cost and just how much we could fit in one day.

Step 4: Booking The Accommodations

Luckily, this part was super easy. To book all of our accommodations, I used AirBnB. It was the cheapest and easiest way to find great places to stay that fit our needs. Instead of paying ridiculous amounts of money per night in a hotel, we were more than happy to pay a fraction of the cost in order to save money for more important things.

Like food for instance. And anime figurines.....

For this trip, we booked three separate places to use as our base of operations in Seoul, Osaka, and Tokyo.

Thank you to AirBnB for making traveling to different countries so much more affordable. #notasponsor #pleasesponsorme

Step 5: Getting Plane Tickets

Typically I like to use various websites (in incognito mode of course) to find my plane tickets, but my two go to sites are Kayak.com and justfly.com

I find that these two sites typically have the best deals on flights, and are much better than what you would find on google flights.

We booked our flights two months in advanced, because that's when prices were at their lowest. It was a bit difficult, because we both needed different types of flights. However, we just made sure that we chose the same flight numbers and were able to easily book separately.

Even better for us, Air Canada actually allowed us to pick our seats ahead of time without having to pay extra fees! We coordinated our attack, and got some great seats next to each other on all of our flights.

Step 6: The Waiting Game

The worst part... and also the most hype part in a way? Waiting for our trip to come.

I still can't believe that it's finally happening. After all these years talking about our dream, it is now becoming a reality. I really hope that this trip will be remembered for years to come, and I'm already planning out our next trip in my head.

But, I should probably just focus on the one that's coming within the next few months.