Travel Day

This morning we had a fairly leisurely time.  We had to get up early for breakfast, but we weren’t leaving until 10 am.

This was the view from our window, and there was a person hang-gliding too.  Well, not hang-gliding exactly because there was a motor.  Whatever that’s called.


 

I went out for a walk behind our hotel.  It was a residential area, but a very steep hill to get around.  For those people who don’t like driving standard, you sure wouldn’t want to be driving one here!

We boarded the bus, the You Bus, to go back to Oganawa to catch the train to Nagoya and then change trains to Takayama.  Well, it wasn’t the Lucky Bus, but it’ll do.



So we hung around train stations for quite a while today.  But...it’s better than airports.  We make the best of our time.

You can buy food and drinks at kiosks between the tracks and they do it by dispensing tickets in a vending machine.  You then present them to the cook behind the counter.  This includes beer.  We needed a little help for ordering though because it’s all in Japanese with no pictures!  A helpful Japanese traveller did the job.




Man, we saw a couple of those bullet trains fly through the station.  They don’t slow down - it’s crazy.  No time to get a picture because they’re gone before you can get your camera up.

Haha - on our 2nd leg from Nagoya to Takayama, we started out going backwards.  I was moaning about it to Gerard and the people across the aisle from us because this is a 2+ hour trip.  Within 1 minute, the loudspeaker person said, “...you are going backwards, but that is because we will be changing directions in 20 minutes...”. Well, there you go.  I like information.

Our train travel to Takayama followed a river up through a valley in the mountains.  Picturesque




Then we landed in Takayama around 5:30 pm.

We walked to our hotel and arranged to meet for dinner at 6:15.  We walked to our dinner spot which was a wonderful experience.  We had little hibachis to COOK our own food.  And tonight it was Hida beef with some vegetables.  Maybe I won’t starve after all!
 



And there was even a choice of dessert.  Gerard snapped up the “souffle” (not egg) with chocolate ice cream.  It was really a sponge cake.
 




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