today everyone going on the trip went to mitsuwa in torrance to get a japan rail pass with twiddle thumbs and her sister as there is a travel agency inside that sells the pass. wow! we are really going! i mean, now that we've purchased rail passes, the actual travel feels closer in a ' this is really happening' sort of feeling. at first i was very hesitant to buy a rail pass, i mean, i wasn't even considering it! i had to be sure that we would actually be saving money by purchasing it so i researched the cost of travel. with the pass, we will save roughly $40 in traveling from/to the airport and each city we will be visiting in mainland japan. now, if we travel with jr within the cities, we will save even more. this is most likely to occur in tokyo only as we will probably take local transportation in the other cities. once i was confident about the savings, i passed on this info the rest in our traveling group.