Saturday, April 22, 2017

Miyagima

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We took a day trip to Miyajima  on Itsukushima island, just south of Hiroshima.  The island is covered in maple trees, has a large, historic shrine complex, and a massive torii in the bay, in front of Itsukushima Shrine. 

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Sunday, April 9, 2017

Hiroshima

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We started off on the wrong foot on our trip from Kyoto to Hiroshima.  We’d reserved seats on the bullet train the day before, which had always been enough in advance, but apparently that Monday was a busy travel day; there was only one train that wasn’t fully booked, and we had to pick seats that weren’t together on that one.  That morning, checking ourselves out of the AirBnB took a little longer than we expected, and we missed the local subway car to the main station by seconds, which then cascaded into missing the J.R. train to Osaka that would have given us a comfortable amount of time to transfer to the bullet train we had reserved seats on.  We took the next available train, 30 minutes later, and which was scheduled to arrive 10 minutes before our bullet train would depart.  As we rode towards Osaka, we used our MiFi to download a map of Shin Osaka, and set to committing a series of escalators, stairs, and turns to memory.  We’d be arriving on the ground floor, on platform 16, and if we were fast and lucky, we’d be departing from the 4th floor on platform 20, after passing through the main concourse on the third floor, where we’d have to present our J.R. passes to get admitted to the shinkansen platforms.  We definitely appreciated our back-pack luggage, as we ran up four flights of stairs,  Fortunately, the signage was excellent as always, and our shinkansen was clearly labeled, so we had no hesitation at jumping aboard the very nearest car.  We’d boarded car 4, and our seats were in car 8, and as we started walking towards our seats, we felt the train start to move.  We’d made it, but we weren’t feeling the least bit cocky, just very lucky and out of breath.  The upside to this adventure was that although the train was nearly full, the seat next to Lana’s was empty, and we decided to sit together and see if the person who’d reserved it had missed their connection—they must have, as we got to Hiroshima without incident.

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