Nine of Us in Tokyo, and the Thing I'd Dreaded Most
A family trip to Tokyo, the seventh continent crossed off, and what a thirteen-hour time difference is teaching me about which work travels best.
Midlife Nomads explores how people are redesigning work, travel, and life in our 40s, 50s & beyond.
Of everything I was bracing for on this trip — the flight, nine people in one group, my youngest’s four high school friends in tow — the thing I was actually anxious about was the time difference.
It turned out to suit one part of my work almost perfectly. This morning I woke up, journaled, had a good breakfast, then wrote up the Owen Sound news from our Tokyo apartment before anyone else was awake. Soon, we’ll we leave for Disney.
The thing I’d worried about most for this trip turned out to be the thing working best.
We landed in Tokyo late Monday, straight through from Toronto, no connection. Trevor and me are here with my oldest and his girlfriend, and my youngest with four of his high school friends. We’re here to see the exchange student he hosted last year. We meet him and his family tomorrow.
We took a city tour yesterday and hit some of the iconic spots: Asakusa and Senso-ji Temple, the Shinto shrine Meiji Jingu, the Imperial Palace and gardens, Shibuya Crossing.
Two experiences were real highlights for me, the first being a goma (護摩) — a fire ceremony for local worshippers at the Fukagawa Fudō-dō temple — no photos allowed so you’ll have to take my word for it. The goma rite is performed to replenish the power of Fudō Myō-ō, so the deity can burn away the obstacles blocking the path to enlightenment. (Yes, please.)
Right after that, our driver took us to my second-favourite, Tsukiji Market. The historic fish market is now packed with incredible street food and fresh seafood.
Somehow, I’ve been keeping up with the only work I didn’t take a few weeks off from — news reporting, and this community. I’d been worried about the time difference. It turns out to suit one part of my work almost perfectly.
The news editing runs on Ontario time. I read what came in overnight while I slept, write it up over coffee, and we head out for the day. I’m back before dinner to do final checks, catch anything that landed after business hours at home, and publish for 6am there. The thirteen-hour gap I’d been dreading became a head start.
And of course, you’re not time-sensitive at all, and I love Midlife Nomads for that.
The rest of my work doesn’t travel as gracefully. Client technical writing wants my regular hours, and court coverage for the cases I follow would have me up at strange hours of the Tokyo night. None of that is sitting this week, which is the only reason the arrangement holds together as cleanly as it does.
So it’s not that the life travels or it doesn’t. Some of the work travels and some of it doesn’t, and you don’t really know which is which until you’re in the other time zone trying to do it. I’d assumed the whole thing would be a series of compromises. One piece of it turned out better than it is at home (where I work nights to get everything out before our readers wake up).
This is also the seventh continent I’ve set foot on, which I plan to celebrate this week. Antarctica was 2017, on a client trip I still can’t quite believe I got to take, so Asia was the one left on the list. I’m glad my first time here is with all of them. Even the four extra teenagers.
So that’s what’s working for me this week, in a place I expected to feel a lot less accommodating of my schedule.
What’s working well for you right now?
ICYMI on Midlife Nomads
Where I'd Send You This Fall
Nomad Cruise 18* — Barcelona to the Dominican Republic aboard MSC Opera, November 2-16, 2026. Fifteen days with 300 digital nomads and entrepreneurs, including a seven-day Atlantic crossing where most of the conference programming happens — talks, workshops, deep work, coworking — plus stops in Tangier and four Caribbean islands.
Solo-friendly (61% of participants travel alone), median age 30-45. Sailing this one myself; readers get €100 off by using discount code MIDLIFENOMADS
From our November Shortlist. These are my handpicked recommendations for stays of a month or longer for working travelers 40+ with quality accommodations, the option of community, and reliable wifi.
Recommended Reads
Pamela Marshall — When People Choose to Leave (The Frugal Traveler, Trail Mix #22)
Pamela read my piece on the people who leave and wrote back with her own version of the feeling, except hers goes back twenty years. Sometime in the mid-2000s she started reading about how civilizations come apart, and the checklist she found read like a description of the present.
Her essay tracks that dread from a 2016 Facebook post nobody reacted to all the way to the decision, now, to put some distance between herself and the country she was born in.
Brian Clark's Greetings from Glasgow checks in from a slow loop through France and Scotland while he runs week two of his Sovereign Startup Foundations challenge (which is still open if you want to catch up).
Chris Lutkin's The Next Atlantic Crossing untangles the rumor that Google is building a data center in the Azores (it's a cable landing station for two new transatlantic cables), and sits with the harder question of who actually benefits when remote workers and foreign capital arrive in a place that's suddenly strategically valuable.
Carol Seymour's What Starting Over at 76 Has Taught Me is a campervan writer's case that beginning again takes more nerve at 76 than it did at 30 — and that the freedom she's found has more to do with needing less than with proving anything.
That's it for this week. Wherever you are right now, I hope it's turning out to suit you better than you expected.
✌🏻 Miranda
P.S. This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Viator, the place to find trips and things to do wherever you end up next. I earn a small commission when you make your booking through this link.