Good News!

Today was just another day of running around doing last minute errands. However, we did receive great news from our realtor. For those of you that need a little background info...we have two homes (the one we lived in and our recently acquired investment property) both of which we had to rent out while we're gone. We put them up for rent in December and had not yet come across qualified responsible tenants. Today our realtor called to let us know that he had indeed found tenants for both of the homes. We are unbelievably relieved. We can now leave with a little peace of mind.
On traveling news: In our planning and errands list we completely overlooked the fact that we needed to exchange money and get traveler's cheques prior to leaving. We had been warned by every brochure and booklet that we'd received from Nova about this way in advance. What we didn't realize or know at the time was that local banks don't actually have foreign currency/travelers cheques at hand. In hindsight this seems like common sense but at the time it didn't seem like it to us. This put us in a bit of a pickle since most places have a turn time of 4-7 days and we didn't actually think of this until last Friday (which meant that we only had 2 1/2 business days before leaving). For our sake, American Express came through and we were able to call before their daily cutoff and order our foreign cash and cheques to be overnighted and they came in today. We're still short of what we were recommended to take with us due to a limit they put on how much you can exchange per 7 days. Our backup plan now is just to take some USD cash with us and exchange it when we get to Osaka if need be. Anyway, everything's starting to come together, so I'm confident that this experience will soon have a successful kickoff.