Day 8 - Journey to Kyoto

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Casual start to the day as our Shinkansen bullet train was booked for 12:07 and were only a 30 minute bus ride from Odawara Station. We were a bit too casual though, and just missed our bus so had to wait an extra 40 minutes. We reached Odawara around 9:30.am. This gave us 2.5 hours before our train, so we put our bags into two lockers at the station and had breakfast at Mr Donuts, before walking to Odawara Castle. We followed the directions to the main gate and walked through to the castle. It was lovely walk, with cherry blossoms lining the main road. When we finally reached the castle, there was a long queue going into the castle, so we decided we didn’t have time and continued our walk through the park when we saw a sign pointing to Odawara Station. Krissy had to go back and get Oscar's pram and we continued onto the station. We bought some lunch at 7/11 and found our train platform easily. As we waited, we watched 4 bullet trains go past and they looked super fast. The two hour trip went very quickly.

On arrival at Kyoto we found the Sanco Inn easily as it is right across the road from Kyoto Station. The hotel seems newer than our hotel in Tokyo and our forwarded luggage was there waiting for us. We decided it was a good time to do our washing, It was going to take two hours so we went out to explore the area and settled on a restaurant within the Kyoto Avanti shopping centre called The Lion of Ginza, on the next block to ours.

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