Day 8 – Taking the Train to Tokyo
We woke up this morning and packed our bags for our return trip to Tokyo. We went down and shared one last breakfast with my grandparents and Ardis and Greg before heading our separate ways.
We were sad to see them go (Ardis and Greg were always planning to go home today). My grandparents, however, changed their plans. They decided it was best to head home with Ardis and Greg. The pace of this trip was fairly intense, particularly for my grandpa who is almost 80 years old. We had a lot of long days, sometimes we had significant time between meals (or we missed them altogether) and often we were catching trains and arriving at our hotel late into the evening. We asked a lot from them. They were troopers. The upside is that we got to travel all over Japan with them. My grandpa was tired and had dealt with a couple of medical issues in the past week. He was ready to go home. We are so grateful they came and that we all got to spend so much time together in such a beautiful place. We are glad everything fell into place so that they could make it home earlier so that they will have some time to recover from our “adventure vacation”.
They headed to the airport while Alison and I went back to the train station. We caught a high-speed train heading toward Shin-Osaka. We really like the high-speed trains in Japan. They are nice, spacious and very fast. They run between 150-200 miles per hour. They are a great way to get around. We had to take two different high-speed trains to get to Tokyo with a transfer to Shin-Osaka. We spent the first few hours of our trip on high-speed trains covering ~500 miles. We spent time looking at pictures, catching up on our trip, and watching the countryside. Japan is a beautiful and well-maintained country. Everywhere we go, even older-looking houses/buildings are well maintained. We also noticed there were lots of baseball fields. Many of the fields had individuals playing baseball. We would have loved to catch a game while we were here, but it did not work out.
We got an earlier start than we originally planned so we decided to add a stop in Kamakura. This was a city my grandpa visited during his mission. We got off the bullet train and had to take two other trains out to Kamakura. We had our luggage and we were on the lookout for a locker. Many train stations have lockers to store luggage and other personal belongings. The hard part for us is that there are normally only a few lockers big enough to store our bags. We ended up looking for lockers at two different stations. We found some, but the ones large enough to accommodate our bags were taken. We had a backup plan. Alison read bicycle rental shops will also hold bags. We found one near the train station in Kamakura and they stored our bags. The only catch was that we had to be back to pick them up by 4:00pm. We considered renting bicycles, but we were short on time and did not know exactly where we were going. Instead, we grabbed lunch near the train station before catching a cab.
Kamakura is a coastal town to the south of Tokyo. It is known for Buddhist Zen temples and Shinto shrines. The most famous of which is Kotoku-in Temple. This temple contains a 13-meter-high bronze statue. My grandpa has a picture from his mission in front of this Buddha. We thought it would be an interesting place to visit. Kamakura is easy to visit in the Tokyo area. We spent some time taking pictures and even walking inside the Buddha. The inside of the Buddha reminded us both of the Statue of Liberty. They look very similar.
When we were finished at Kotoku-in we walked back through Kamakura to the train station. On our way, we passed a shop selling corn dogs. They looked a little different, plus I was still hungry after lunch, so I bought a cheese dog. It was pretty good. Like most cheese I have eaten in Japan, it has a slightly fishy flavor.
We picked up our bags at the bike shop and began the journey to our hotel in Tokyo. We ended up on one of the busiest trains we have been on in Japan. It was packed, but only stayed that way for a handful of stops. With the detour, we were back to normal trains. These trains still travel around 60 miles an hour (Alison downloaded a fun app on her phone that uses GPS to tell us our current speed). During the past week, we have become very confident in navigating Japanese trains. The stations can be a bit confusing, but we have gotten the hang of it. The Japanese rail system is a marvel. There are so many trains going everywhere. Each train is clean, well-maintained, and on time. We have very much enjoyed traveling by train throughout Japan.
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| This was one of the busier trains we rode on during our time in Japan. |
By this time we were ready for dinner. We took the monorail over to Ikspiari, Tokyo's version of Downtown Disney. After wandering a bit we decided to eat at Mai Chibo. It is an Okonomiyaki and Teppanyaki restaurant. We were famished from traveling so we sat down and ordered all the food. We had fried gyoza (seriously so delicious), asparagus with spinach and cheese, noodles with shrimp, and other various seafood and chicken mixed in, and we ordered an Okonomiyaki. Okonomiyaki is a Japanese savory pancake containing a variety of ingredients. Ours had some noodles, squid, shrimp, and other items. It was very delicious. For dessert, we got french toast with ice cream. This was one of our favorite meals.
After dinner, we called it night. We are excited to explore Tokyo DisneySea bright and early tomorrow morning.
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