Escaping On the Early Train

So tomorrow is the big day! I made it through the week and am heading to Tokyo. Ben comes in the day after tomorrow but I figured I would take a day for myself and save some money by using a special ticket that I have had for a while. The kicker to the special ticket is I can only take local trains. This means that a three hour bullet train ride to Tokyo at the cost of $140 turns into a twelve hour ride for free. That makes for a really long ride and it takes a good chunk of the day to do. So what I think I am going to do is jump on the first train from my town to Kyoto at 4:45am and then make my way up to Shizuoka. By the time I get to Shizuaoka, I may decide that I want to make the rest of the trip by bullet train and if I do that then, the ticket would cost me less than half of what it would cost me if I started from Kyoto on the bullet train. We will see, I have options.

We will be staying in the same hotel I always use while in Tokyo and then on the 13th (Japan time) we will go to Hiroshima and stay for a night. After that, it is back to my area where we will take in a festival in Osaka on Saturday and also fit in a trip to Kyoto and Himeji castle. Like when Jim came, it will be a busy week but it will be a ton of fun.

The big difference between Ben's visit and Jim's is that Ben is less concerned about seeing a lot of the cultural stuff and more interested in experiencing all of the different cities. This is one reason we are staying an extra day in Tokyo, because there is some stuff there that I didn't get to show Jim that I want to show Ben. When Jim and I left Tokyo both of us agreed that one more day would have been nice and so I fixed the scheduling for Ben's visit.

I am also excited because with Ben comes the newest expansion pack for the Sims 2. Yay!

Anywho, that is what the next week holds in store so I will probably be sporadically updating this to reflect our movements when time allows. Stay tuned, fun stories and pictures to be coming soon.