Heading Home - Saturday 19 October

Well you loyal blog readers, I am just showing you that I have stamina and technological capacity to blog to the very end.

Today we woke to eagerly face the end of the journey at a relatively leisurely pace. Fuji was still in hiding!

Our last chance to see Fuji from our hotel room.

Off to Dean & Deluca on the other side of the station for breakfast - nice to start the day with a large latte even if it was a little on the weak side. Also took ourselves down to street level to look for the high bicycle storage system that Alison had seen on YouTube before we came to Japan. Sure enough with a little walk there it was. People pay to store their bikes in a series of underground silos and when they need the bike they simply enter the number corresponding and the bike is lifted up to them at the surface. 

Where your bike is whisked away!

We then meandered back to the hotel to finish our last bit of packing, check-out and deposit our luggage with the hotel. Back then to the food section of the Atre Shopping centre and picked ourselves something delectable to lunch on whilst journeying south on the Shinkansen. Back to the hotel to get our luggage and then once more across to Shinagawa Station and the Shinkansen waiting room. Our train left at 12:40pm and we had the rear two seats in our carriage with our suitcases safely stored behind us. Alison insisted that we wait until 1:00pm to eat our lunch.

Yes Fuji came out to say goodbye to us as we sped along in the train and no this is not a fake photo taken from a poster. Alison was over the moon.

We were actually in Car 11 which is specially designed to handle disabled passengers and a young woman in a very large electric wheelchair bordered at one of the stations on the way and sat in a space just across from us. The Japan Rail staff were excellent in getting her aboard and in place.

Got to Shin-Osaka at 3:30pm with a change of platform needed to get to the Haruka Express to Kansai. Could not believe the rudeness of an older American woman who was in the same crowded lift as us from the Shinkansen platform - thrusting her train ticket in the faces of a young Japanese couple asking where her next train would leave from. They told her in broken English that they didn't know!

We made our way to the correct platform but couldn't quite workout where our carriage would actually be and we made a bad decision so that when the train actually stopped we were quite some distance from the train itself let alone our carriage at the opposite end! Made it into the second carriage from the front as the alarms sounded for doors closing and then wended our way down the train to our carriage and reserved seats.

Now at Kansai airport with Philip having successfully located two most important things! A Subway outlet so we were able to once again enjoy a salmon and marscapone sub for dinner and to bring Alison's Japan holiday to a real close - a Daiso Y100 shop!!!!

Will sign off now and see you in Oz.