This will be the first time in many years, eleven to be exact, that Mick is heading overseas without me.

In 2012, he spent almost a week in Las Vegas with our son Tom, attending a Mining Conference of all things. I’ve heard some of the stories of that trip, including about a helicopter flight over the Grand Canyon and a Segway tour through hotel lobbies in Las Vegas, as well as about Mick getting lost trying to find his way back to his hotel room after too many beers one evening. Las Vegas and that trip was where he discovered his passion for IPA.

In a few days, Mick is heading off to Japan with our son Tom and his fiancée Emma, and Mick’s little brother Bernie. They will spend almost 3 weeks there together.

Now before you feel sorry for me, I actually chose not to go, For some reason I have never had a ‘yen’ to visit Japan. People who have been tell me I’m mad. But there you go.

Mick has been before. Another long, and sometimes funny story of his trip to Japan exactly 30 years ago with our daughter Brydie and her girlfriend and classmate Janelle, when the exchange rate was pretty woeful (74 yen to $1AUD, unlike now when it is almost 93 yen). Mick was principal of a small school in outback New South Wales in 1993, and Brydie and Janelle were studying Japanese by correspondence. Their trip to Japan in January of 1993 was a ‘ school excursion’. Why not? Their itinerary was built around the locations of three Japanese people our family had ‘hosted’ – two were female students for relatively short periods of time from 10 days to 3 months, and one was a mature-aged Japanese man who was an architect, who came to ‘teach’ maths and Japanese at the small school we were working at. He stayed for one full (school) year.

Let that sink in.

One year in a four bedroom house with one bathroom and one toilet; Mick and me and our five children (then aged from 15 to 6), and a 54 year-old Japanese man named Ken. Mick and I both were working full time – Mick was the principal of the kindergarten to Year 12 school (but the locals called him the “Headmaster”) and I was the Head Teacher of the secondary section of the school who taught Science (and the locals called me the “Headmaster’s Wife”). Well, at least in the first few months until I sorted that out.

But those ‘hosting’ experiences paid off big time. Mick and the girls had free accommodation throughout Japan, not to mention very generous hosts who insisted on showing them all they could about their country. The final evaluation showed that the Japanese Cultural Tour of 1993 was a very worthwhile school excursion.

Mick has always wanted to return to Japan, and this opportunity to travel with Bernie, who lived in Japan for 12 months where he taught English, was too good to turn down. Not to mention, that Tom had offered to subsidise the holiday ‘big time’, including shouting Business Class flights for the troupe of four.

Mick does contribute to documenting our holidays – usually through drawing cartoon / comic-like scenes of events that tickle his fancy, however I am the author and photographer of this blog. This trip however, I have been assured I will get a summary of the daily activities and some photos that I can use to record their vacation.

I have agreed to be their ‘ghost writer’. But they will have to trust me about adding my own reflections as the days go by. Just as I am trusting them to provide me with the material.

You are welcome to join us, in what may be a very unusual adventure.