On Thursday morning we stumbled back to the mansion to catch an hour or two of sleep, then check out and take the shinkansen to Kyoto. Checking out shouldn’t take that long, we reasoned. Wrong… True to our normal fashion, we were late getting out the door that morning, the urgency of the situation not fully dawning on us until we realized that we had to go to another building to check out…with shinkansen tickets departing in an hour. We decided to split up, sending Vince and Christine to the mansion office to check out while the rest of us, lugging their luggage along with ours (although the bulk of it had already been sent ahead by a takkyubin delivery service), went ahead to Tokyo Station to get on the shinkansen. We made it with about ten minutes to spare, but as the minutes ticked by it seemed less and less likely that they could join us.

Finally we get a cell phone call from them as they arrived at Tokyo station—with the shinkansen leaving in one minute. Tim gave them directions and told them to hurry…but soon the doors closed and we started off from Tokyo, wondering if they’d made it. After a while we get a message from them saying they’re “on the train, in car 7”. We were in car 7, and we didn’t see them, so we were a bit confused; did they get on the wrong train? Eventually we got it all straightened out: they were able to catch the next train a few minutes after ours, but we had a nice stressful start to the day.

The shinkansen was nice—an incredibly smooth ride, though not really as fast as I was hoping (like I should be complaining though—Tokyo to Kyoto in three hours is no small feat). I fell asleep for most of it though, which is really too bad because I bet the scenery was nice. We emerged at Kyoto station to wait for them…and wait…until we get a message saying they had already left Kyoto for the hotel. WTF? Really… The term Camille used was janky, but I really wouldn’t have cared so much were I not lugging around Christine’s bag.

So we made another Bad Decision: why shell out money for a taxi when we could just take the subway? I don’t know who decided Kyoto subway stations didn’t need escalators, but I was cursing the architects by the time the day was done. We got to Shijo station searching for an exit—any exit—that had an escalator or elevator for luggage, but alas, we had to just lug our bags up a whole lot of steps. And unlike the subways in places like New York, Taipei, or Tokyo, these stops were fond of concealing just how many steps there were by having you turn about three or four times on the way up. Lesson learned: the subway is best traveled with light baggage.

We emerged into daylight in downtown Kyoto, under the covered arcades of Shijo (Fourth Street)’s shopping district, McDonald’s and Mos Burger (mmm…Mos Burger…) gleaming in the sunlight. The hotel turned out to be a lot farther from the subway stop than it looked on the map but we eventually made it there too.

Our first night there they took us to a great Japanese (well, duh…) restaurant where we sat in a tatami room eating sushi and tempura. Ohh, it was soo good… and, of course, free. The next day we trekked across the Kamo River to the Stanford Center. Kyoto really is a beautiful city on foot. An extensive network of canals and streams meant we were walking along water most of the distance, under blooming trees…so much more springlike than the Michigan I’d left behind nearly a month ago.