Van from Lexington Indianapolis
Plane from Indianapolis to Los Angeles
Ship from Los Angeles to Yokohama/Tokyo
Bullet train from Tokyo to Osaka
(and a bunch of shuttles, buses, trains, and even a water bus in between!)
What a journey!
Cooper loves birdies of all types, and the penguin is the mascot for Suica (transit cards)
This way to Osaka!
We walked ten minutes to the Akihabara station, then rode two stops on the Yamanote line to Tokyo station, which handles 500,000 passengers daily. We got there almost two hours early, so we headed to the waiting room. It was tiny and cramped and kind of hot (since there were open air escalators leading to the platforms). We ended up seeing another family from our worldschooling group. This same family was at the Denver airport the same time as us, too.
One step closer!
Butter sandwich, anyone?
Finally, we saw the Shinkansen bullet train pull in. There was plenty of space to put our luggage overhead and/or by our feet. No one checked our tickets (though we had to scan them at the terminal entrance), and the train had already started moving by the time we had all sat down !
I was with Cooper and Colson. Lucas was with Calvin and Chance, and Carter was by a stranger. We had purchased eki (station) bento boxes and ate them on the way. We also spent a lot of time looking out the window although unfortunately Mt. Fuji was not visible when we rode by.
I bought them what I thought was milk, but it was a banana flavored protein drink
Leg room for these long legs of mine!
Tokyo Station to Shin-Osaka Station is 308 miles and would take us 6 hours, 40 minutes by car. But the bullet train took only 2.5 hours (up to 175 mph!).
A famous souvenir is Tokyo Banana, which is like a banana-flavored twinkie with banana cream.
There were only a few stops, but one of them was Nagoya where many of my Japanese friends in Lexington are from.
In a tight elevator at the station.
From the Shin-Osaka station, we rode one stop on the Midosuji line, then walked to Minamikata station, where we rode one stop to our home station Juso. (we normally wouldn’t do one-station rides when we could just walk but with all our luggage, we went for the trains!).
Our first spotting of the most common Osaka manhole cover
Juso is our home station!
The first restaurant we saw at our Juso station was a taste of home—Kentucky Fried Chicken (though the boys said we’ve never taken them there, so they don’t even know what it tastes like)
From Juso station, it was a 3 minute walk to our home away from home! We were 30 minutes before check-in time but went on in since we had instructions to get the key from our mailbox. Our house is perfect for us! More on that later
We went out the East exit, so we had to go under the tracks to the other side
Our little international traveler!
Here’s the vending machine right outside our door (this could be dangerous with Chance’s new obsession with Orange Fanta)
Getting into our house for the first time!
We’ll give you a complete tour later…
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