The Long Ride from Tokyo... Day 4

This post is the grand finale in our David Does Japan series. Our final morning in Tokyo, we woke up early because we were scheduled to catch an early Shinkansen (bullet train) ride from Shinagawa Station in Tokyo to Odawara Station in the western part of Kanagawa Prefecture. And let me just tell you, sometimes the clueless gaijin in Japan get very lucky.

It's not very often that I get to travel by bullet train. Since it was Obon week, we booked the tickets several weeks in advance to insure we'd get tickets before they sold out. Because of that, I kinda forgot what time we were supposed to leave Shinagawa. So I quickly glanced at the ticket at the hotel and it said 9:40am... great, we had plenty of time. Long story short, we got to Shinagawa Station around 9:00am and made our way to the bullet train platform. There we read the sign indicating upcoming trains and their departure times, and low and behold, our train was at the platform and getting ready to leave. As it turns out, our train wasn't departing Shinagawa at 9:40am like we thought... it was arriving in Odawara at 9:40am. Lucky us for getting there early... though it didn't stop Nicki and David from teasing me about reading the ticket wrong.

When we got to Odawara, it took us a bit to figure out which train would get us to Hakone, our ultimate destination. Hakone is a resort area that is a familiar long-weekend vacation spot for Tokyoites, which was expected to be crowded during Obon week, but we wanted David to get the bullet train experience so we figured we could deal with the crowds once we got there.

What we didn't expect was the tremendous crowds being paired with tremendous heat. Don't get me wrong, Hakone is beautiful and I definitely want to go back soon, perhaps later in the fall when the hazy days of summer are over and we might have a great view of Mt Fuji. But on this trip, we took the scenic loop around Hakone and then got the heck out of there. In fact, we did our tour so quickly that we had to request an earlier Shinkansen ride back to Tokyo.

On our scenic loop, however, we got to ride a cable car, an overhanging ropeway line, an old wooden ship, and a Japanese bus. So we covered quite a few forms of public transportation along the way!

Anyway, in summary, if you have the chance to visit Hakone, it's well worth a day trip from Tokyo provided you've done all you wanted to do up that way first. Just don't travel during Japanese holidays or during a major heatwave.

Pics are up in our Gallery, dated 09/13/2007.