I’m gonna use the blog again now that I’ve finally decided on a date for leaving Japan.
I got a ticket for August 3rd!!
It still goes through moments of feeling real and moments of feeling completely unreal, but it’s leaning more toward the real side these days. ^_^

I’ll leave out of Kansai airport near Osaka and head to my first stop: Manila. There’s a discount Filipino airline called Cebu Pacific Air that flies around Asia a bit, but they don’t fly out of Narita, so I have to go through Kansai to use them. In the end, the ticket was about 19,000yen (about $200) after taxes. I’m hoping that that’ll be the most expensive ticket I get on my trip — time to crack down on spending!

If you’re anything like me, you read lines like, “I’m gonna use the blog again now” and think, “just do it! Don’t tell us you’re going to”. But fortunately, as this hasn’t been updated for a long time, you’re not probably not reading this now and I can get away with writing stuff like that. Mwah-ha-ha-ha!!
I’m gonna tell you what I’m gonna do now. Not because I think you’re reading, but because it helps me have something written out saying what I plan to do. That’s good for me, and if you care about me so much that you’re reading this, you’ll appreciate that for me too, I’m sure.

First of all, I’ll be adding a lot more blogging to my online communication mix. When I’m traveling, I’m aware that I won’t be able to access reliable internet the majority of the time. That’s especially a problem in dealing with video, but it’s also a problem with providing for a sense of consistency. I’m well aware that consistency is essential to good online communication. That’s hard enough to do when I come home to a super-highspeed internet connection every night. Blogging will give me the ability to maintain a more consistent online presence than vlogging will, as well as diversify the kind of audience that I’ll be able to communicate with.

Recently I’ve been searching through quite a few travel blogs and vlogs trying to find what makes things catch my interest, and what just bores me to tears. A common thread is that basically, when it comes to portraying travel, the written word has an uncanny way of pulling you in that video seems to fall short on. I find myself often struggling to force myself to finish a travel video, where blogs wrap me in a world of wonder and give my imagination free rein. Admittedly the genre of solo travel blogging is much more developed and has a lot fewer obstacles to deal with. A writer isn’t grasping at moments of perfect lighting and passing images, needing stabilized equipment always on the ready to catch the moment. There is time to take in the depth of the experience and process it before even starting out on creating a post, which gives it a sense of clarity and purpose that few videos can capture.

Personally I’ve been away from writing for a while, so it’ll take a little while to recover my voice, but I’m kinda looking forward to it. I miss writing.

Soon I will start a RTWsoon vlog section on my YouTube channel, but before that, I want to create a RTWsoon section on this blog and start to document and organize my thoughts as the travels draw near. What topics concerning preparing for RTW travel interest you?