Saturday, May 16, 2015 I was awoken at 6:30ish this morning to the sound of Fred getting ready to go running. It didn't take him long to come back though because it was pouring rain outside. I went back to bed until my alarm went off at 7:15am. The rain was still coming down pretty well, so I took that opportunity to upload some pictures to my blog. Around 8am the rain was dying down so I began getting ready for my day. The boys had planned on leaving around 7 or 8am to catch a train from Kyoto to Tokyo. When I was ready to leave for my next hostel at 8:45am, they were just getting up. They had to tease me that I was up and out before they were (I didn't expect anything ... read more

In order to get a early start, we had ordered breakfast to be delivered to our room at 7:30am. Somehow we all were up and out of there way in time for it to be brought in. They cleaned away our futons and set our table up with trays of breakfast food. It was a diverse tray with more things that I could possibly eat. I tried everything, finding the things I enjoyed most and finishing those off. You can guess what the guys' trays looked like by the end. Again we finished the meal off with tea and coffee. Then we packed up and dropped our bags off with the front desk so we could continue exploring Arashiyama before heading over to the opposite side of Kyoto called Higashiyama. Our first stop of the morning ... read more

This was the boys earliest morning so far, I had them booked to take the 8:45am Shuttle from our hostel to the train station to catch our 9:20am bus to Mishima Station to grab a train to Nagoya. We arrived with plenty of time to grab breakfast from the station (they got hot dogs!) and catch the bus. At Mishima Station where we were able to catch a bullet train to Nagoya just a few minutes after we arrived. We had a couple hour ride ahead of us so we got some lunch and snacks for the trip and settled into our seats. As we arrived in Nagoya, we had to figure out what we were going to do with our limited time because we were only there one night. Due to a Typhoon hitting the ... read more

Exhausted from their late night excursions, the boys slept in. I utilized this time to catch up on writing and doing some laundry so we all had underwear for the next leg of our trip. The easiest way to write by blog has been using the computers at each of the hostels, but even those pose their challenges. The keyboards at them are different from home. While they have the normal alphabet they also have alternate letters for the Japanese language and a bunch of extra keys to fit them all on there. That means the space bar, backspace, and many others are not the same location as normal. Forgive my typing then if some random Hirigana {Japanese written language} ends up in it. When the guys finally woke up around 11am, we all headed out ... read more

During my quick late night review of our plans for today, I realized we were supposed to have ordered tickets from a local convenient store (Lawson) for the Ghibli Museum since we had planned to visit there this morning. Luckily there was one by another touristy spot we planned on visiting so we stopped by to get tickets on our way to Yoyogi Park. After a couple failed attempts using the only in Japanese machine, we realized there was no available times on the days we were in Tokyo to go. Giving up on that plan, we headed to the park. This huge park's name stands for Imperial Garden and is managed by the imperial family. It was a very tranquil place but there were a number of homeless men with tents assembled on the side ... read more