Travel day: to Kyoto

The view from my window this morning 

Amazing right?

We arrived in the dark last night, and it was a very rushed one night stopover on our way to Kyoto. Get your bags, room key, find the dinner room - no dining options here other than the hotel. No problem the food was delicious, and then get to your room to sleep because of the early start the next day. I’m not sure if it’s by design but all of this underscores perfectly the drama of opening the curtains in the morning to this

I’m pretty sure I heard a collective intake of breath. No room has a bad view. Whoever got permission to build in this field was absolutely brilliant. 

To break up the journey south we stopped at Obuchi Sasaba (a tea plantation) walked through the local village, I wonder if that annoys them - bus loads of tourists wondering their streets to get to the local tourist spot, up an increasing steep hill through a gorgeously earth-scented forest. 

To see the only spot where you can view tea fields & mt Fuji, according to Ken, but not today because clouds.

The rest of the day was travelling interspersed with stops at huge roadside way-stations. When we arrived in Kyoto we did a quick suss-out-dinner walk around the block in the twilight, and through one end of the huge Kyotogyoen, a garden park about two blocks from our hotel 

Rich suggested a few types of places to watch out for when we were searching for sustenance & Mike put that advice to work tonight when suggesting we eat a a pub that the locals were frequenting. As a rule of thumb this is generally sound and proved itself tonight. He googled it and found this place down an alleyway and it was perfect. 

A typical pub menu with a Japanese twist. A jolly bar tender who knew exactly what I wanted when I said single malt, neat (I love Japanese whisky btw) and he brought the bottle to the table too (there wasn’t much left) 

Such a great evening with our best friends.