With twinges of sadness, but wonderful memories we left the beautiful Hakuba village.
Bob kindly drove us to Hakuba Station and James and Jennifer collected their town stamp. Our train soon arrived so we farewelled Hakuba and started our journey towards Osaka.
We quickly disembarked at what we thought was Matsumoto, we were ready for the rush of a 3 minute changeover to catch the Nagoya train. One problem, we didn’t jump off at Matsumoto, we were one station early. Fortunately the Train Guard stopped us and we got back on the train. We explained to the Guard we were in a rush and had “san” (3) minutes to catch our train to Nagoya. The next stop we were ready!!!
Evidence of how thoughtful, considerate and helpful the Japanese people are was about to be displayed… The Guard confirmed we needed to go to platform 1. We dashed towards the lifts, the people in the lift tried to fit us in but the doors would not shut even with only 3 in the lift, so we hopped out to wait off the next one. The lift doors opened again, we jumped in and at the top another Guard was waiting who told us they were holding the train for us and showed us to the platform. Another Guard was at the bottom of the escalators who directed us to hop on the train. Phew! With all that help we made it and were bound for Nagoya on the Shannon 10 Limited Express train. Arigato Matsumoto!
After a quick changeover in Nagoya we were on James’ favourite train the Shinkansen Hikari to Osaka. This train sped along like a rocket yet was very smooth. We all agreed it was the best train ride so far.
We arrived at Shin-Osaka and swapped to the local express train to go to Osaka station, then hopped on the Osaka Loop line to our local station Morinomiya. We hopped off the train and in a short distance we saw the beautiful and majestic Osaka Castle and felt welcomed to Osaka.
