Today was our travel day to Onomichi. We got on the Shinkansen, ate our bento box lunches on the train, and arrived at our hotel (Green Hill Hotel Onomichi) around 12:30 pm. Our hotel was towards one end of town, so once we dropped off our luggage, we made our way across town to the bottom of a nearby Gondola.
Along the way, we passed through the main (covered) street in Onomichi. Because today was Japanese culture day, things were quite lively, which was fun to see. We stopped and got an ube malasada (Benton said it wasn’t anywhere as good as the malasadas from Leonard’s in Hawaii, but that’s a high bar: TODO add a footnote: Discussion of this prompted Lucy to look up where else Leonard’s has locations, and it turns out that their only non-Hawaii location was in Yokohama, in a building that we visited 🤦. Benton regrets not making a stop). After stopping in a café for a bit (Lucy got a honeybush tea), we made it to the Senkoji Temple Mountain Ropeway Base Station, which we took to the top of Senkoji Park (nice views).
We hung out a bit on the top of the park, and then we made our way back to the bottom, passing through Cat Alley (Neko no Hosomichi) (a street with a ton of rocks/walls painted with cats on them + a few real cats).
Then, we walked back to check in at the hotel (stopping to grab some egg-flavored ice cream on the way), where we hung out for a bit (until dinner).
For dinner, we got ramen at a vending machine ordering place (Shoya Hanten). The quirk with this ordering machine system was that we had to load it with money before being allowed to select options. We both got some ramen, and we also split some pretty good gyoza. After dinner, we split a mochi donut from a chain called “Mister Donut”. We planned to get up early the following morning to start our bike ride, so we didn’t stay up much at all (we just went to bed instead).
