We trained about an hour and a bit out of Kyoto to get into the town of Nara, in the Nara prefecture. The plan was to rent bicycles and ride around. I had the thought that this would be more similar to our walking around the countryside trip, but Nara was a decently sized town with a lot of people and buildings and such.

If you open the above picture and zoom in the middle, there’s a turtle sunning on that log.

There was a ton of deer in the area, and a vendor selling deer treats for 150 yen. Sean bought some, and became the best deer friend.

ALL THE DEER.

BEST DEER FRIEND. 😛

A little Buddhist temple.

I was really bummed out about this part. This sign is for a shop that specialized in cat souvenirs. They had lucky cat statues and cat plates and mugs and it was all cat all the time. We were really hungry when we passed it, and food was getting hard to find because restaurants close from 2 (to 3) until 5pm most days. I wanted to go back, so I made plans with the guys to meet up again shortly after food. I ran back…and then remembered I didn’t have any cash on me. He didn’t take VISA, but he directed me to an ATM…which wouldn’t give me any money. It was a lot of effort and back and forth, but I had to give up. Cat stuff!

Outside of town, biking through a park area. This was getting on in the day, and we were meeting Sean nearby who had texted us to say that the shrine he was at was closed.

While Sean was sitting there, it turned out that he’d had the thought to change our plans. When we arrived, he suggested that we might skip out on the last night in Kyoto and go to Tokyo instead. In the middle of this field, he’d been on AirBNB, had contacted a potential home and had talked with the owner! Nik and I thought this was a fine idea (we were done touring Kyoto) so we made it happen.

This photo is after Nik has lifted my backpack and not at all gently dropped it forwards. Onto my camera. >.> My stuff was fine, but we wanted evidence that he was actually sorry. 😛

These are the last of my photos!

April 17th we thought the weather would be more rain, but it turned out ok. We trained north to Nagoya and then walked around Nagano for 2 hours. It was very cold in Nagano! That night we went out for dinner and drinks and ended up drinking with our host, who was… well, he was originally from Nebraska. He’s a gay Japanese TV personality. Apparently his spot is a travel spot on how to ask for things in other countries, so how to say “I would like a taxi”, explaining that English to Japanese travelers. His Japanese was amazing!

April 18th we had that breakfast I wrote about, and then walked around a lot buying souvenirs for our friends and family back home! 10pm we got on the plane. Traditionally, I haven’t been able to sleep on planes, so the fact that we were leaving so late and getting home 3pm PST was really worrying. I did manage to sleep for about 5 hours off and on, which I think was really helpful for surviving the weekend!

Last night, had some NyQuil as I’m feeling pretty sick, which helped me sleep through the night, although I woke up around 7am anyway. Now onto getting over the sick and the jet lag!

I’ve got one more post, my traditional “Lessons Learned” post, which I’ll get to shortly before signing off on this vacation!