Friday, February 10 is day two in Sapporo.  First we’re stopping at the hotel breakfast room for our complimentary breakfast – which consists of all you can eat fresh bread rolls and croissants with juice, coffee and tea… not good for anyone’s waistline but it’s so hard to stop eating the bread.  Every Japanese person in the room put their bread in a toaster oven to heat it up.  We were the only ones who would dare eat cold rolls.  I toasted my croissant though and it really was so much better!  You can order a traditional Japanese breakfast in advance for an extra 400 yen (about $3.75) but it looked to be miso soup, seasonal vegetables, salmon steak portions…

On Thursday, February 9 we got up very early and took the bus and train to Osaka Itami Airport.  This airport is so convenient for us!  We took the monorail straight there and it took only 20 minutes.   We are headed to Sapporo, the main city on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island.  Sapporo is the fifth largest city in Japan and home to Sapporo Beer.  It is a hop, skip and jump from Siberia.  I bet Sarah Palin can see Russia from Sapporo, too.  We had already taken the cats to the pet hotel the night before.  Poor kitties.  I hope they like it there.  They are becoming regular guests. We had two main objectives to going to Sapporo:  to…

Our last day in Bali was Friday, December 23.  We took the red eye flight out at 1am on Friday night/Saturday morning.  This put us back at Kansai International Airport in Osaka at around 12:30 in the afternoon on December 24, Christmas Eve. On our last day John said we needed to go to the beach because we’d been in Bali for nearly a week and still hadn’t seen the beach!  From my research, it seemed like Nusa Dua on Bali’s south end was a nice place to go.  I would have liked to have seen the famous surfing beaches, or the small secluded beaches that require a hundred steps to get to, but we just didn’t have the time…

The agenda on Wednesday, December 21 is Waterbom.  This is a large water park that claims to be the largest (or best?) in Asia and #2 in the world.  I’m not sure according to whose rating system this is measured but it was a good one.  Waterbom is in Kuta, the happening area with the shopping, eating, nightlife and all around lively end of town.  I would say Kuta is the “Waikiki” of Bali.  After another morning visit to Cafe Moonlight we asked Yoga to drive us to Waterbom.  It is pretty pricey to go to this water park, so it is really aimed at tourists.  When we asked Yoga, who is in his early-mid 20’s, if he’d ever been…

I’m back to Bali again.  It’s past the new year but I’m going back in time.  On Tuesday, December 20, we ate breakfast at our neighborhood hangout, Cafe Moonlight, and headed out.  This time a young man named Yoga (pronounced Yo-gur) drove us to Bedugul.  It really isn’t that far but the traffic is as bad as Los Angeles at rush hour (all those crazy scooters clogging up the streets!) and so we spent a lot of time in the car today.  I had three things on my wish list for today.  One was to go to Taman Ayun Temple.  Then I wanted to take the kids to an adventure park called Bali Treetop.  Lastly, I wanted to see the…