End of our trip to Japan

We returned home after almost 3 weeks in Japan, visiting Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Himeji. It will take some time to post my experiences in the land of the rising sun, in reverse chronological order. Will also cover my month long trip in Italy back in May/June; that may take a while to complete.

To start, these are the luggage covers I bought from a Mega Don Quixote in Tokyo. We got covers only for the new suitcases that we checked in for the flight back to the US. The medium one was bought in Kyoto, the large in Tokyo as we, i.e. my daughter, accumulated more purchases. Sure made it easy to find the cases in the luggage claim area! Will describe Don Quixote a bit more in a separate post about shopping in Japan which we did a lot of!

I decided to stay at the Hotel Villa Fontaine Grand Haneda Airport, to make sure that we did not miss our morning flight. This was a very nice and modern hotel located in the Haneda Airport Garden, right past the new shopping arcade. Easy access to the check in and departure gates in Terminal 3. Wish I had taken a photo of the hotel entrance which was on the 4th floor of the airport. We got there by taking the airport limousine bus directly from our disney hotel in Tokyo Bay; it was a breeze to book via cell phone. They even took our large suitcases, so there was no need to transfer our luggage separately (more about that in a separate post). Below is a stage/exhibit area in the center of the Airport Garden; the area was rather quiet.

Lots of options for dinner: we went to the Oedo Food hall so that each could order different types of Japanese food instead of one type of restaurant, like the 2nd photo below which was a Chinese restaurant; others specialized in curry, sushi, udon, etc. Ordering was done on a kiosk with an English menu and lots of photos. Laurel ordered the wonton ramen set that came with beer, while I had sashimi over rice and sake. We swapped our drinks since she did not like beer and I did not care for sake.

Breakfast came with our room rate, the hotel's restaurant was located on the 1st floor. We were at breakfast when it opened at 6 am, to have plenty to time to make it to our flight at 10:30 am. The huge Japanese and Western buffet was amazing; I binged on my last Japanese breakfast for the trip.

The ANA non-stop flight was uneventful; it was not full, nice to have the middle seat empty. After arrival at Dulles Airport, I booked an Uber ride for the first time. It was so easy, came in just 5 minutes. Less cumbersome and cheaper than our other option which was to rent a car to drive back to Bowie and return it to BWI. We could have taken the metro to New Carrolton (like we did when we left for the trip) and an Uber home from there, but we did not feel like managing 4 suitcases and 2 backpacks on the train. Traffic was light and we got home in about 50 minutes.