After the first workshop that I came to Japan for, we took a taxi to Ueda and checked in to our hotel.  There is a laundromat near by that I used last year.  I should have gone there, but I didn’t.  I decided to do laundry at the hotel.  The girls went for a walkabout around town.

As I was loading the washer, I looked down at my dirty shoes.  They were a pretty mint green a week ago.  Now they were brown.  I took them off and threw them in the washer – what could go wrong?  I contacted Rika to see if she wanted to go to dinner with us since she was also staying the night in Ueda.  She contacted the host of the guesthouse in Bessho Onsen and got a restaurant recommendation.  We aren’t even staying at the guesthouse anymore and Rumi is on it!

I moved my laundry to the dryer and texted the girls to meet me back at the hotel in 20 minutes.  When the dryer load was complete I opened the door and a puff of white snow filled the air.  It went everywhere.  I looked around panicking a little hoping to find a broom or something I could clean the snow up with.  Nothing.  As the snow settled, at least it blended in with the floor.  No one else was there, thank god.  I must have washed a kleenex by accident and it disintegrated into a million pieces.  I pulled my sopping wet clothes (covered in snow) out of the dryer.  I went back to my room barefoot and the girls helped me hang my clothes so they wouldn’t get funky during dinner

After dinner, I slinked off in the rain to the laundromat near by and dried my clothes.  Wish I had just gone here first.  Oh well, what else was I going to do tonight?

The next morning we walked around the Ueda Castle after breakfast, then checked out of the hotel and got on our train to Tokyo.  My suitcase handle broke – ugh. 

There was a craft store Peggy wanted to go to in Tokyo (recommended by Rumi, of course).  Once in Tokyo Station we successfully navigated to a luggage storage place.  It took some standing around in the middle of a throng of people trying to get our bearings, moving to another area, standing around, making another educated guess on where to go, taking an elevator, and sending me out as a forward look out to decide which way to go, but we found it fairly quickly.  Once our luggage was stored, Peggy and I marked our location on maps and took photos so we knew we could be reunited with our luggage later.

We took another train to the craft store.  It was huge and had lots of fun things.  I bought some origami paper and some tape to fix my suitcase.  Why did I buy origami paper?  I already have a bunch at home I am not using.  Dumb. 

After, we were hungry, but feeling the need to be on our way pretty soon.  We opted for McDonald’s, mostly to see how different it was than in the US and because it would be quick.  It was different, but not huge differences.  They bring your food to you.  I had a chicken sandwich that was ok and an orange fizzy drink that tried to kill me instantly with sugar.  Sally got a happy meal with no toy.  That’s not happy.  I did manage to finish my sandwich before the drink took my life force away.

We successfully retrieved our luggage.  We found a ticket counter for the next train we wanted to take and Sally and I bought tickets.  The guy asked 157? And we said yes.  After getting the tickets I realized, 157 was the time.  Shit, we have less than 10 minutes to get to the platform.  I turned to the other girls and said “It’s go time”.  Look for signs for platform 14.  We found it in perfect timing just as the train was arriving.

Once in Odawara, Peggy navigated us out of the train station to the bus stop.  There were people everywhere and the name of the bus we got on didn’t match the characters on my phone.  Google maps was giving me nothing in English so I couldn’t even ask, “do you go to —-?”. Peggy tried to show our destination to a bus attendant type person and they pointed to the bus everyone was getting on.   We crammed on with our suitcases and held on for dear life. 

There was a parade just finishing up in Odawara so the streets were packed with people on vacation for Golden Week as well as floats returning to wherever they came from.  It was fun to watch.  We sat in a lot of traffic.  The mountains around us got steeper and the jungle denser as we left Odawara. 

The next town, I had researched possibly staying there, but we didn’t book before hotel prices went up.  When we passed through, it appeared to only have one thin road lined with shops.  There were so many people, they could barely walk.  The hotel I had liked was way up a giant hillside.  I couldn’t imagine how we would have even gotten up there.  Maybe it was better we didn’t stay in this town.

Each area we went through looked similar – steep mountains around and nowhere to walk.  We finally got to our bus stop and had to walk single-file on the side of the road.  There was no sidewalk here.  A couple blocks later we found our hotel, had a welcome drink and some “sweets” made out of beans.  So many things are made of beans here.  Bean sweets – I’ll eat them, but not my first choice.  Even my pillow has beans in it – why?

We asked the hotel to help us try to make a dinner reservation.  They called a couple places that were all booked up for two nights (Golden Week).  We decided to eat at the hotel.  The public bath at the hotel was nice after dinner.