October 13, 2024 We awoke to a quiet Sunday morning in Alice’s family’s neighborhood near the Botanical Garden. Alice had worked hard to get people on board with a family photos shoto this morning. Everyone was on hand and seemed to be making some progress, though the young ladies were way behind schedule, needing to …
October 12, 2024 This town is a tropical and it’s going to be hot a fair amount of the time. But it cooled down nicely last night, and Alice and I slept well in the family’s third floor bedroom, overlooking a rooftop garden. The garden has been greatly expanded and improved since my last visit …
October 11, 2024 We were well settled in our comfortable little hotel in Osaka. The hotel room was spacious for Japan with natural light and two double beds. Everywhere there were natural touches like gardens and soothing classical music. We got up and went down to the included breakfast. The attendant asked how we could …
October 10, 2024 This post will be short due to the day being occupied by train rides and some technical issues getting photos off the camera. We awoke to bright sunshine in our little hostel/apartment along the shore of the island that faces our destination town, Onomichi. I was curious to exploe the town before …
October 9, 2024 Finally, after days of rain, we got the spectacular return trip on the Shimanami trail, and it was worth suffering rain for 2 days for it. We awoke in our nice new hotel in Imabar with the sun streaming through the windows, a foretaste of a beautiful sunny day. We decided to …
October 8, 2024 Our hostel was in silence as we woke at 6:40. Everything about it was designed to work perfectly for people biking through, with very careful instructions for use of the public bathroom, shower and other common areas. We made a little cheap instant coffee and headed out into the gray morning. As …
October 7, 2024 We awoke well rested in our microscopic room. Our bags were repacked, ready for the bike trip with only the things we’d need for the 3 days on the bikes. Really minimal. We pushed our bags on their rollers down the city streets toward the train station, and stopped at a little …
October 6, 2024 Today is a transfer day, mostly in the train, so this will be a short post. We awoke from our comfortable and quiet Kyoto hotel near the train station and went down for breakfast. Afterwards we packed up and headed down, walking 1 -1/2 blocks to the Kyoto trains station. We bought …
October 5, 2024 We caught some beautiful weather for our day of touring classic and favorite tourist spots around Kyoto today. We started the day with our hotel breakfast as usual, this time without the drama from poorly behaving foreign guests. Today we jumped on the train in the central train station and headed toward …
October 4, 2024 We arose from a deep sleep in the Henn na hotel, despite the room’s juvenile dinosaur theme, and headed down to the hotel breakfast in what was described as an Irish Pub, with memorabilia of the Rolling Stones in Kyoto. The woman in charge of the breakfast seemed to be struggling with …
