Joe Rodin Has A Blog

It is incredibly difficult to make a top 10 list in the heat of the moment. Almost every day on the trip I found something I loved, so by the end of my trip, there'd be many items from the early part of the journey that'd be missing from the list. Now that I've given myself a few weeks to decompress and look back on the trip as a whole, I've come up with a top 10: 10. Sapporo Is it fair to write down an entire city? This is my list, so I say yes! Sapporo was tied for the shortest stay with Nagoya, both of which lasting only 19 hours, so the way I see it, you can do what I did in Sapporo in a single day trip. The three main tourist attractions in the city are all grouped very close together, Odori Park was a beautiful snow covered stretch, plenty of shopping and food to go around as well. Sapporo is at the top of my list for cities I want to see again, mostly based on that I wasn't able to spend much time there. Sapporo TV Tower, Clocktower, and Government O...

January 4. Instagram Today is the longest train ride of my journey split into two pieces. The first is Sendai to Shin-Hakodate 6:40am-10:01am, switch trains, and then Shin-Hakodate to Sapporo 10:24pm-1:46pm. For a total of 7 hours and 6 minutes. I used most of this time to write short stories and anecdotes that I will never publish, but just to have them saved somewhere outside of my brain, and to research my route through Sapporo. The one downside of the train method is that I'll be losing the most time of this trip by arriving in Sapporo late in the afternoon. A small benefit is that Sapporo being the 5th largest city, there are a lot of late-night options, and I'll have a 4 hour train ride in the morning and can use that for nap time if I need to. Yes, I'm a light sleeper, but the trains feel like they're floating on clouds and it's such a smooth ride. On my arrival to Sapporo, my first stop is a ramen shop by the station called Sapporo Ichiryuan. Based o...

Criteria The most important thing when it comes to traveling, first and foremost, is where I'd like to go and what I want to accomplish: Criteria . A real vacation should cover these six fields: Sightseeing/Tourism, History, Food, Shopping, Weather, Leisure. Sightseeing/Tourism : If it's ancient or brand new, if it's a cool building, a fun event, a "must-do" whether for locals or travelers, I want to do all of it, or as much as possible. I'm a tour guide in Boston, so I love to see what other cities have to offer. History : Square and a rectangle with sightseeing, not all sights you see are necessarily historic, so if I'm going to a new country/city, I need there to be a draw in terms of its history. Food : When it comes to being at home, I honestly order almost the same thing every week from the same places, and maybe have 7-10 recipes I rotate through. When I'm in a new country, I love to just go wild trying every new dish I possibly can, and ...