Getting ready…

First thing you wanna do when you travel sporadically is plan everything.

And when I say everything I literally mean everything.

Fortunately Sara graduated in the end of February (she got a perfect 110/110 cum laude in computer engineering), leaving her plenty of free time to plan this trip.

We created a map on Google MyMaps with all the potential cities we may touch during our vojage. In a text document we shared our finding regarding each City, places to visit, hot spot, tourist traps and so on.

These two documents were followed by a time plan reporting the exact days spent in each City, the address and Google Maps link of the sleeping place and the name of our host, if any.

TripAdvisor forums were a big help to find the best areas where to sleep, enjoy nightlife (which we are aiming to experience at best :D) and be easily connected.

We spent time searching for the best places to eat and sightsee, exploiting our JRPass as much as possible. We decided to get the JRPass after checking this website, which is extremely useful to verify whether getting the pass is actually worth when compared with buying single ride tickets. This website together with hyperdia are the two most useful websites to get infos for traveling by train in Japan.

Using Google sheet, we created an easy to understand timeline to better plan the movement between cities.
After days of feverish research we came up with a map, which we called Golden Route, showing all the places we are going to touch while traveling around Japan.

We won’t bother you with the packing process as there are thousands of website explaining how to do it…