Day 14: Back to Tokyo

Not too much to report today as we spent almost the whole day traveling, but still had some fun to report. We woke up at the Machiya and got all of our stuff ready, the manager showed up to swap the blanket as the next tenant had an allergy and needed special accommodations. We thanked her for a great week, packed up our luggage and headed out. On the way we soaked in all the Kyoto goodness we could while lugging around 50lb bags.

Me in Kyoto, on Shigeru Miyamoto's 60th birthday...can't say I thought that would ever happen

We made it to the local train station and did our usual subway hop over to Kyoto station. There we used our magical passes to get two seats on the next train to Tokyo and hopped on. The ride was great as usual, riding a train for 2 hours seems to be much better and easier than riding on a plane. We had a lot of leg and luggage room and could relax a bit reading our Kindles. We had missed it the first time around due to fog, being on the wrong side and napping, but this time someone alerted us so that we could get a shot of this...

We made it to Tokyo station and had to almost entirely relearn the Tokyo subway system, not only because we hadn't been here in a few days but also because we now had the JR passes and would want to use their lines whenever possibly. We mapped out our route to Shinjuku and hopped aboard. The greatest thing about these is if the station we are going to is JR we don't even have to get new tickets or swap anything around, just show the pass when we get there.

We got off at Shinjuku station and switched to the local subway. Shinjuku station is considered the busiest train station in the world so it was an interesting adventure dragging huge luggage through it. We made it unscathed but our blood pressure may have been a bit high when we jumped onto our final train.

Once we made it to the hotel we checked in and checked out the room. No walkthrough video this time, it's just a standard hotel room. To be honest we're enjoying a bit of the normalcy in our last week as we get ready to go back to our regular lives.

The view from the hotel and the area around it is much more active than our comparatively sleepy areas in Kyoto and Asakusa. Huge skyscrapers tower over the sidewalks and stretch for quite a while. We are actually not too far from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government buildings and have a great view of them from our hotel window.

We ended the night with a long walk around the area. It started off as an ill fated attempt to find a certain restaurant whose special trait I won't spoil since we found it on another day. By the time we realized my address had been completely wrong we were already halfway across town and surrounded by bright lights, busy streets and tons of good smelling food. We've both gotten a little addicted to the noodles here so we swung in a noodle shop and got some along with some fried dumplings, a new favorite of mine as well, then made our way back the way we came to get back to the hotel.