Our Long Journey

Alexis and I managed to wake up and be on the road by 7:00AM this morning. Mrs. I was nice enough to let us park our car at her place, and she drove us to the airport this morning. We arrived at the airport at 8:45AM, and we were able to check-in, drop off our bags, and get through security in less than half an hour. Thank goodness for being Premier Executive! We had two hours to kill, so we sat down for breakfast at Andale, and picked up some coffee before our flight.

Our flight to Narita was long, the entertainment was mediocre and the food was even worse. For one of the meals, I had wonton stuffed pasta with mushroom sauce. I wish I took a picture of it because words can't describe how it tasted. For the second meal, I decided to be adventurous, and I tried the curry crepe with mango chutney…bad mistake. It was a strange curry-like concoction inside a miniature crepe. I should have been conservative and eaten the turkey sandwich instead. In addition, two different flight attendants spilled orange juice on my leg during the flight. All in all, it was a strange flight, and unfortunately Alexis and I were not able to get much sleep on the flight.

We landed in Narita, and the airport seemed pretty empty. Because the airport was not very busy and because the Japanese are efficient, we picked up our luggage and got through customs in about 45 minutes. From there, we obtained our JR pass from the Midori no madoguchi, and got on a 4PM train from Narita to Shinagawa. Unfortunately, the NEX is not running on a full schedule, so the train we got on took over 90 minutes to get to Shinagawa.

I started to get hungry again, so I picked up ekiben at the Shinagawa train station. We wanted to eat a snack for the trip, so Alexis got tonkatsu, and I got a bento box with onigiri, tsukemono, tamagoyaki, and various fish and vegetables including renkon, satoimo, carrots, and yellow bell pepper. I opened up my ekiben as soon as we sat down on our train from Kyoto. It really hit the spot. Alexis really liked her bento as well. We caught a 6:10PM train to Kyoto, and that's when Alexis and I crashed. We were dead tired and fell asleep on the trip. We got a little lost trying to find our hotel, but we managed to find our way. After 18 hours of traveling, we reached our hotel around 9:30PM, and we're ready to get some rest before our bus tour tomorrow. Sorry for the lack of pictures. We'll start taking more tomorrow.