little house on the westside

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Hiroshima - Day 1

Day 1

For the 3-day weekend in January, we traveled, along with our friends Marcus&Gaby that were visiting us to Hiroshima. Tristan, knowing that we would be riding a Shinkansen (bullet train), would ask daily "How many more days?". Finally the day was here, we were all packed, including Tristan's two trains. First we had to travel to Yokohama to catch the bullet train from the Shin-Yokohama station. Tristan literally kept saying "I'm so excited!".

Waiting at the station

Here it comes!

Series N7, if you wanted to know

This is so exciting!

Partial view of Mt. Fuji

Tristan kept his trains on the windowsill (I think we must be in a tunnel here)

Our train ride was about 3 1/2 hours

Here's the interior of the car, the leg room between each seat is probably an extra foot compared to airplane seating and the seats lean WAY back.

Once we checked into our hotel in Hiroshima, we headed to Hiroshima Castle for a bit of sightseeing before dinner. It was destroyed from the atomic bomb, but later rebuilt.

This is one of the outer buildings of the complex

The main building, which now houses a museum about the history of the castle and has several Samurai artifacts

Jamie trying on some Samuria garb (and apparently posing as a Ninja)

The view from the upper floor of the main castle building.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Tokyo Disney - Dec 29th

Monday started out wet and rainy but since we had already purchased our 2 day passes, we pretty much had to to go Disneyland (it's not a flex pass like in California). I thought we'd get an early start and that combined with rain and a Monday, that it would be less crowded. Nope. Buzz Lightyear ride - 200 minutes. Monster Inc - 180 minutes. Pretty much every popular ride had a standby wait that was around 3 hours. So the first thing we did was go get Splash mountain fast pass tickets before they ran out for the day. Then I stood in line with the littles for Monsters Inc (partly because they had a covered area to stand in) and Chad and Jamie stood in line for Star Tours. I think the wait was actually more like 2 hours so that was good. Then we headed over to Tom Sawyer's Island because that was a wait of zero minutes! We spent a good time out there exploring the whole island and then we came back and found a covered area to eat our lunch. Finally it was time for Splash Mountain! Tristan said it was his "first favorite ride", and we all had fun. Jamie ended up getting splashed but he had a water-resistant coat on anyway so it was no big deal. I bought the picture of us going on it, I'll try to take a picture (of the picture) soon. After that we went on Mark Twain's riverboat and the carousel, then Chad took Tristan on a rocket ship ride while I took Jamie and Abby to Thunder Mountain with the next batch of fast passes that we had gotten. Once that was finished we all headed onto the It's a Small World ride, which Tristan also really liked (as did I since it was quite warm inside!). We all went over to Toon town to visit Minnie's house then Chad and Abby went on Thunder Mountain and I took the boys on the little roller coaster, as well as exploring a bunch of the different houses in Toon town. Once Chad and Abby returned, we went on the little coaster again and decided that we were frozen enough to not be able to stay another hour and a half to wait for the electric light parade. Instead we opted to head over to the district near our hotel and we found a ramen shop to warm up in, and had some really tasty ramen while we there!