We are doing a lot of travel today. The temporary pause at the hot springs was an eye of the storm moment, but a beautiful one. It was also fab that the temperature in the higher altitudes was a blessing. The Japanese breakfast is stunning. Highlights and lowlights, you choose. Squid with fish roe, a smashed dried mackerel, miso, fish custard, pickled vegetables, melon, coffee…
Checking out from the hotel we ambled into town towards the station, it was not too late in the morning so lots of people about and many tourists leaving and arriving. We narrowly missed the RomanceCar express so caught the standard Hakone train back to Odawara. Arriving into Odawara we needed to get a series of Shinkansen. The ticket office took 20 mins straight to sort 15 seat reservations on three trains. It would have taken us an hour to fight with it. The total time on trains was over 4.5 hours but in a rather cool act of planning our ticket angel orgsnised it so we never had to change train platforms for our journey!
Needless to say I was in bullet train heaven. So many trains and so fast. Here are some of the pictures we took on the way and the end of day 4. We also discovered that apple juice is not always apple juice. Konjac is a jelly based drink. It is quite weird and not refreshing really but it is sort of juicy. However it warns that it is in fact less than 10% juice.
