Please Officer - This Never Would Have Happened Before I Had Kids

It's been a few days since my last post. I've been buried underneath the rubble of my procrastination.

Before kids, there was no rubble. No giant piles of papers to be filed, no mounds of incomplete to-do lists suffocating under the weight of new, incomplete to-do lists.

Before kids, I was organized. So much so that I listed it as a skill on my resume. I never would have waited until the last minute to prepare for a trip to the market, to the dentist, much less to, uh, JAPAN!. We're leaving in less than two weeks and up until two days ago I hadn't given a moments thought to travel requirements, itinerary, anything.

A couple of months ago, on a whim, hubby and I decided that IF we could use airline miles and IF we could find an affordable hotel, we would go to Japan. (We like ignorant spontaneity like that, it's who we are). We got the miles and and the hotels (you'll find out why we got great deals later), so here we are off to convert our hard-earned worthless dollars into Yen for a family vacation. (Hey, it's a bargain compared to the Euro.)

So I've had a few months to meditate on our trip, prepare our schedule, check out the customs so we don't embarrass ourselves by doing something stupid like re-filling our own water glasses while dining out (apparently a Japanese no-no.) But did I prepare at all? Of course not, it's not who I am.

When my hubby and kids ask, "Are we going to see temples in Japan? "Do I have to use chopsticks in Japan?" Do I have to take my shoes off in Japan? " I wanna say "How the f**k should I know? Here's the book, crack open a page if you're so curious." Instead I say, "Oh, isn't this going to be a fun adventure. We're going to be daring world travelers! Yay!"

Then after everyone is asleep, my husband is satisfied (HA!) and blogs are read and written, my heart begins to palpitate and I have difficulty breathing. I decide to check out TripAdvisor.com just for a minute before I go to sleep. Many hours and a succession of mini-panic attacks later, I am sufficiently freaked out. I have journeyed miles on the internet and uncovered massive webs of mind-boggling transit lines, trains needing advance reservations, traffic congestion, unbearable August heat (hence the cheap hotel room), must-see tourist destinations I've never heard of and can't decipher how to get to, and difficulty using foreign credit cards. Wha????

I link over to a U.S. government travel site to escape the confusion and check a few easy things off my list: AC travel adapters, passports, luggage tags, etc. I make sure we have all the travel documents we need and don't carry anything forbidden (hmmm?) so we don't get detained at the airport or arrested and put in a Japanese jail cell (which I'm sure is spic-spanny clean but who wants to bring that souvenir back to the States.) I was hoping to feel better, more in control. Instead the site made things worse by warning me about avian flu, terrorism, earthquakes, monsoons (yes, 'tis the season, again why hotels are so cheap), criminal syndicate activity, pickpockets, and emergency call numbers (but not from a cell phone because the numbers don't work from cell phones). Cell phone!? Apparently we need to rent cell phones because ours won't work in Japan. How? Where? From whom? No iPhone? Whaaaa?

I print pages and pages of must-have information like who to call in case my children are abducted and which restaurant serves the best sushi. I haul ass to get shit done making everyone around me crazy and cursing the day they skimmed their anxiety stones into my zen rock garden of denial.

Ahhhhhh! My simple American mind is imploding. And Japanese. Shit, we have to learn Japanese. What is with these people? They're a modernized culture - don't they speak English?

Okay, okay, I'll stop. At this point you're probably hyperventilating right along with me so I'll spare you and tell you that shortly after my heart failures, I realized that Japan can't possibly be as bad as these websites purport because no one ever comes back from Japan and talks like they've just been to... Hell or... Colombia.

So, I'm going to try to chill out. Boil down my info sleuthing to the essentials because I know that once I get everyone on the plane without detention or arrests....once we settle into our hotel, I will take my pages and pages of essential tourist info, the countless hours of my precious time, and...
...bury them under the new itinerary we're going to get from the hotel concierge.

Before kids I never would have done this. I was so much saner than I am now. Okay, NOT. Just a different kinda crazy. I think this is better.

Sayonara.


P.S. I promise to send pictures. Hopefully, they're not all wet from the monsoon or sweaty from the heat.

P.P.S. If any of you world travelers have been to Tokyo or Kyoto, please, PLEASE, send advice and suggestions. I promise not to go ape shit on your ass.