3Q (Thank you)- a China blog

 yo! So Osaka was a pretty cool deal. Our itinerary was pretty loosely structured, I had a few things in mind that I wanted to take the kids to and number one on that list was Universal. This trip was originally going to be in August but we ended up changing the dates around to make use of some flight credits that Keith's job was offering, so I had originally planned for us to be at Universal on Ollie's birthday. While we have a much quieter evening planned out now, Ollie and Nolan had a blast! Ollie wasn't really into it when we got there, but as soon as we were on the first ride he was into it As for the second day, the kids and I went to this great place called Kids Palace! Its kind of like a Please Touch Museum! They had a ton of fun. There were a few school trips that were there with us, and they found a friend to play with while they were there! We met up with Keith for lunch and walked to a cool indian/nepalese place for lunch, where I had a Nepalese beer (not bad).

 Been a while!  Way back in January before Keith left, we had started spitballing ideas of where our summer trip should be! A few ideas were thrown around, but eventually we settled on Japan. In June we bought our tickets, made reservations, and I was tasked with the itinerary.  Originally, we had planned on flying into Tokyo and then flying out of KIX/Osaka, but it ended up being cheaper to go the other way around so we started in Osaka, spent an afternoon in Nara, and a couple days in Kyoto before taking an overnight bus to Tokyo. We did talk a lot about rules of international travel to the kids, and one of those rules was "no toys outside of the hotel." We did this because we knew at some point we'd lose something. This I knew would be especially hard for Nolan, but there was one incident in Hong Kong that we had to talk about in depth and then mostly just a little grumbling for the rest of the trip, so I say everyone had some personal growth! yay! Anyway, the first st