A Series of International Incidents: The Disastrous Daytrip*

For the last major tourist hurrah of my mother's visit, and making the JR Pass an excellent deal, we took a crazy one-day trip to three locations, Okayama, Miyajima, and Hiroshima. These are all along the same train line, but a few hours away from us and from each other, so we took a very early train out and the last train back to Kanazawa.  The travel agent may have called me crazy when I went for the tickets.

First up, we spent a couple of hours in Okayama, the town with Koraku-en, the last of the three famous gardens in Japan we needed to see on this trip. We also saw the local castle, which is one of the better ones I've seen in Japan:

After having a leisurely early afternoon in Okayama, it was back to the train for another hour to Hiroshima, where we would take a local train and then a ferry to Miyajima, home of the famous red torii. The ropeway up to the top of the mountain was closed, so we were unable to get a view from the top, but did head out to the beach to get a close-up view of the torii:

We also had a close encounter of the crustaceous kind (isn't he so cute?)(Editor: gag!):

Sadly, I was unable to get the excellent fried oysters, because apparently everything closed up before 4 pm on the island this time. We did get some delicious steamed oysters though!

Next up was Hiroshima. We walked around the statute and memorial filled atomic bomb park grounds and then headed back to the train station, trying to find some food on the way. I failed at that - I was looking for specific types of fairly quick places, which I'm sure were around, but I didn't manage to find any before we needed to be on a train, so we got takeout instead.  My mom got a very Japanese meal, a bento and a beer for the train:

I chose to take the safer route and grabbed some food from the McDonald's next door. This particular bento was actually pretty tame, a very enjoyable mix of rice and other things. She had an authentic train meal to finish out our long, long day.  Bento are not always so benign.

We had another day in Kanazawa to relax and see the last couple sights, and then it was time for my mom to head home again. This was a great trip and I was so happy she was able to make it to see where I've been living for the past few years.

Can't wait to be home again, only seven more months! There are a lot more pictures of the whole trip on Flickr.

*Daytrip not particularly distressing - the titles of this series of posts references A Series of Unfortunate Events because the international incidents part is semi-accurate and coming up with alliterative names for the rest of it is amusing.