We planned appropriately for once -- there was some serious rain overnight, and this morning the rain continued. Would certainly have not been a great day strolling around Miyajima. We slept in and by mid morning were walking around in the drizzle on our way to the Peace Memorial Park. We stopped at Starbucks (of course) and lamented the wacky policy places like Starbucks have in Japan for free wifi internet. They "offer" it, but it requires a lengthy registrati...

Today was another early start as we had an early train to Hiroshima. We were told that it would be hard to find a taxi at this very early hour from the hotel to Tokyo Station to catch our shinkansen to Osaka, so we started walking towards Ueno with the hopes of catching a taxi there. We were concerned that taking the metro with our luggage would be a problem -- even at 5:30am on a Saturday, we didn't want to take any chances! After only a few minutes we flagged...

Today turned into one of the longest days of travel and sightseeing. Probably we were a bit ambitious in our planning... We left Nikko early this Saturday AM for our return towards Tokyo. Instead of stopping at Tokyo, we changed trains there and headed to the town of Kamakura located south of Tokyo. Since we brought very little luggage with us for our one night in Nikko, we didn't have much baggage to deal with and didn't need to stop by at our hotel in Tokyo. ...

We were excited today for our first trip outside of Tokyo. Even more exciting, today our JR Pass activation begins, so we are able to use the JR rail system as much as we want for the next 7 days! We splurged a bit and got the "green" pass, which essentially enables us seating on the equivalent of first class cars that are available on longer journeys. The only thing we needed to do was to reserve seats in advance for the long haul trains - this assured there we...

Today was another early start for our long day trip to Hakone to get into nature and hopefully see Mt. Fuji. We bought the tickets required a few days ago at Shijuku, so we had to head back over there to take the Odakyu rail to Hakone-Yumoto. The ticket we bought is called the Hakone Free Pass. Nothing is "free", but the pass includes not only the train to/from the area, but a bunch of other transport options (boat, cable car, etc) that are to be enjoyed in the ...