13 February 2011

Emily hurt her neck, sleeping badly on it overnight, so right from the start she would not stop going on about it so I'm afraid I was quite tense all morning and the mood was a little strained. A dose of Calpol seemd to help a bit. Before we had to leave for Nara, we had an hour to look around in Yoshino, and Nick wanted to visit Kinpusenji Zao-do in particular. The way there was downhill and only half a mile, so we walked there. We passed a natsu mikan tree draped in snow, and also a house selling homemade umeboshi (pickled 'plums' - actually Japanese apricots).

The temple building is the second largest wooden structure in Japan, and very impressive. Emily was more interested in playing in the accumulated snow while Nick went for a stroll around.

The clock was ticking so we had to curtail our visit and make our way back up to the car. Having played quite happily for half an hour, now Emily refused to walk at all and was moaning again about her neck, so poor Nick ended up carrying her up the steep hill.


It was a good thing we left on time because the drive to Nara took full two hours. I was at the wheel this time and felt a bit nervous on the slightly slushy, twisty roads, before we made it down to the clear main road. Luckily Emily slept more than an hour as we hit heavy traffic halfway. We dropped the car off and had a brief lunch in the station cafe before getting the train to Kyoto.

There we met Masahiko and his wife Satoko in another cafe. Poor Emily was unsurprisingly fed up with being seated all day so she and I adjourned outside and had a bit of a run around then tried to find Starbucks in a nearby mall to get a coffee for the shinkansen journey. I couldn't find the cafe and it was getting close to departure time so we went straight to the ticket barrier to meet Nick, who had meanwhile gone off to the mall to find us. I had it in my mind that the train was at 4:15, but as we scanned the departure board in vain for a train that time Nick looked at the ticket and saw that it was actually 4:09. We had missed it by two minutes! If only we had stayed together we would have made it on time. We had to take our chances in the unreserved carriages of the next train, which was very busy. Emily and I got one seat sandwiched between two businessmen with Nick a few rows down, but luckily the man next to him got off at Nagoya and were able to sit side by side for the rest of trip. We were very lucky as a lot of people had to stand in the aisles or sit on their bags (which in the old days I would have been fine to do but not now with Emily to think of). We were pooped by the time we got home and all got off to bed at the earliest opportunity.