Japan was my first vacation that wasn’t to a tropical/hot country, so there was a lot of things that had to be done differently.

• 2 weeks away is too much. Was happy at 11 days. At 13 days was super ready to be done.
• If I’m going to do any navigation at all, I’d need a new phone with full day battery. We used Google Maps a lot to get around, but I could barely turn it on in enough time, let alone have enough power to use it all day.
• Related – this trip finally saw good use of my external battery. When you leave the house at 9am and walk until 10pm, and use the phone all day, the extra battery is important. Nik with his superior phone needed it a lot.
• I didn’t really need shorts for this trip. I brought a pair of pants that had zip-off leggings and they were fine. I’m not certain I would have left the shorts at home though – there could easily have been a 23 degree day where I might have felt comfortable wearing them.  1 pair of shorts, 1 pair of pants and 1 flexible pair sounds like the ideal combo for 2 weeks.
• I don’t need a plan every day to have fun. I do need to do something every day, but it doesn’t need to be super planned out. Often we just left the house and started walking. Japan, as a place with a wildly different culture from us, as well as a place that is tightly packed, had a lot of awesome things to see that were very accessible.
• I used my camera bag as my primary bag for a lot of the trip. Japan has vending machines everywhere, so I packed a couple bar foods, my camera, a few small lenses and my visa/rail pass/subway pass and I’m good to go for the day. Usually I carry my backpack, because if I needed to carry at least one more thing, I don’t have enough space anymore.
• The FitBit works for about 12 days without charging. At 12 days it started saying to charge it, so I might have been able to get to 13 or even 14 days without charging.
• When they say “nobody speaks English in Japan”, they really mean it.