This day ended up being quite a long travel day. We got up and took the local train about 40 minutes to Fukuyama, where we transferred to our Shinkansen. While we were waiting, the Hello Kitty Shinkansen stopped by, which was pretty cool.
Since we were at a smaller stop, the express high-speed trains also passed by, which was pretty crazy (they didn’t seem to slow down much at all; they just came barrelling through the station).
After taking our Shinkansen to Shin-Osaka Station, we then transferred to our next Shinkansen (a 3-minute layover, which Lucy was nervous about, but it ended up being just a walk across the platform 🙂). Our next stop was Odawara, where we grabbed lunch before taking a bus to our hotel (Shinanoki Ichinoyu).
The bus was pretty terrible: it made stops way more often than seemed necessary, didn’t really have good storage for luggage (despite it clearly being a pretty busy tourist destination and most people having luggage), and seemed to have a confusing, and very slow payment system (we had purchased a pass for the Hakone bus, which meant we didn’t have to deal with this payment). For the most part, things in Japan seemed to make sense (we could trust that there was a system for things like paying/ordering), but this was probably the clearest exception.
The bus took about an hour, and after checking in at the hotel, we headed to the Hakone Venetian Glass Museum (Glass Forest), which was very random, but also pretty cool to see (lots of glass plants/art). After visiting the museum, we had just enough time before dinner to go to the only store in town (7/11), where we purchased some snacks + some (7/11 brand since it’s all they had) umeshu.
After making it back to the hotel, we immediately went to dinner (we were staying at a ryokan, so traditional breakfasts + dinners were included with our stay). We ate a ton of food, then used the onsen in our room, and finally hung out in the room a bit before going to sleep.
