Japan had been on our list so long that I had stopped expecting it to happen. It was the sort of trip we mentioned often and never booked.
For me it came down to three pictures I had been carrying around for years: Mount Fuji, the red gates at Kyoto, and DisneySea.
In May we finally went - seven nights, eight days, four bases. My husband and me, and our parents with us.
Day 1 - Osaka, in the rain
A driver was waiting for us at Osaka airport, a lady, which none of us had expected, and it was drizzling as we came out - the light, clean sort of rain that makes a city you have never seen look better than it probably is.
Our parents took one look at the hotel beds and stayed there. Entirely fair: they had been travelling the better part of a day.
So it was the two of us who went out to Dotonbori that first evening, into the noise and the signs and the crowd, and ate omurice and whatever else looked good from a counter.
Nothing about it was remarkable. We were just finally in Japan, and that was enough to make an ordinary evening feel like something.
Day 2 - Kyoto and Nara, and a man called Mr Shaad
After breakfast a car arrived with Mr Shaad in it, and from that morning until the end of the trip he was our driver, our guide and the person who decided when we had spent long enough anywhere.
He started us at Nara, where the deer are not in an enclosure - they are simply there, on the paths, unbothered by any of us. Then Todai-ji, which is the kind of building that makes everyone go quiet without being asked to.
Arashiyama came next. Walking into that bamboo is the closest I have come to standing inside a photograph, all of it green and vertical and much taller than it looks in pictures.
Then Fushimi Inari, and the thousands of vermilion torii gates going up the hill, one behind another behind another, until you cannot see where the tunnel ends. We finished in Gion, on the old streets, as the light went.
Both meals that day were at Indian restaurants. I had braced myself for a week of missing home food and it never happened once.
Day 3 - Kobe, and a castle
A gentler day, which we needed. Kobe Port first, where the waterfront has a European look to it and there is nothing to do but walk along it slowly, which is exactly what we did.
Then Osaka Castle in the afternoon, the building itself and the gardens around it.
By this point I had stopped trying to summarise Japan to myself. Three days in we had gone from temples to bamboo to a European waterfront, and none of it belonged to the same country in my head.
Day 4 - The bullet train
Of everything on the itinerary, the Shinkansen was the one I had been most childishly excited about.
It did not disappoint, though not in the way I expected. It is not the speed you notice. It is how little you notice the speed - no lurching, no noise, the countryside simply changing outside the window while nothing at all happens inside.
We checked into the hotel in Tokyo and found a Nepali restaurant directly opposite the entrance. My mother was delighted. Between the Indian places in Osaka and Kyoto and that one across the road, we had been thousands of kilometres from home for four days and had not once had to eat something we did not want.
Day 5 - The mountain
We went to Owakudani first, the volcanic valley where the ground steams and the famous black eggs are boiled in the sulphur springs. You smell it before you see it. There is a bridge with a glass floor there, so you can stand over the vents and look straight down into the steam coming up.
Then the cruise on Lake Ashinoko with the mountains all around us, and later Lake Kawaguchiko.
And somewhere in all that, Mount Fuji. I had been looking at photographs of that mountain for years and had a fixed idea of it, and then it was simply there, in front of us, the actual thing.
It was one of those days when you don't need to say much. You simply stand there, look around and feel grateful that you are actually experiencing something you had dreamed about for so long.
Day 6 - DisneySea
This was the one. Of the three pictures I had been carrying, this was the one I had been most impatient about, and I will admit I was slightly worried it could not survive that much anticipation.
It did. Sinbad's Storybook Voyage, Tangled, the Magic Carpet of Aladdin - but honestly the rides were not the thing. The thing was the park itself, the way every corner of it has been built to be looked at, and going round it with my family rather than on my own.
Some dreams really are worth waiting for.
Day 7 - Tokyo, and the crossing
Our last full day went to the city. We did a tour of the landmarks, and then Shibuya Crossing, which I had assumed would be one of those sights that is better in photographs.
It is not. Standing at the edge and watching that many people step off the kerb at the same moment, and all of them getting where they are going without touching each other, tells you more about Tokyo than any building could.
Energetic, modern, organised, endlessly interesting. Exactly the city I had imagined, which almost never happens.
What I brought home
The things I expected to remember, I do - the mountain, the gates, the park.
But the ones that surprised me are smaller. A lady driver in the drizzle on the first evening. My mother's face at the Nepali restaurant. Mr Shaad deciding, correctly, that we had seen enough of somewhere. Our parents keeping up with all eight days of it.
Japan will hold a corner of my heart for a long time. And I would go back tomorrow, which is the only review of a country that really counts.
