Thursday, January 26, 2024

• One of the top three most magical moments of my entire life – we’d booked a PRIVATE ONSEN for early this morning. It was actually a pretty ambitious (read: doomed) plan, where we were going to wake up, pack up, go to our morning private onsen time (which was as soon as it opened), try to enjoy our complementary buffet breakfast, then make it back to the train station in time for the ONE train running out of Kinosaki station this morning. Unsurprisingly, breakfast was skipped entirely.
• But the onsen…. It was incredible. Well appointed, had a hot stone sauna area, a lounge area with complementary bubbles, and an open air hot spring facing a beautiful snowy mountain, closed off on three sides for our privacy. The water was beautiful, the gently-falling snow on the mountain ahead of us was beautiful, it was literally the best thing we’d done that didn’t involve actually getting married. What a morning!!

• After we finished up in heaven, we raced back to the room to get changed/finish packing, checked out, and made a mad dash to the shuttle bus to make it to our train on time. The hotel staff were running ahead of us to flag the bus down and carrying our luggage for us. We really didn’t leave ourselves enough time to achieve everything, but they moved mountains to help us out and make everything work for us.

• Made it just in time! We are learning from this experience though – as I write this blog, we are heading back to Japan in less than two days, and we have two nights stay in Kinosaki planned for this trip!

• Transferred at Shin-Osaka to the Shinkansen back to Tokyo. The healing properties of the private onsen were starting to wear off and the flu was poking it’s head in again. So we’d pulled the trigger on a last-minute change of plans. We were originally heading from Kinosaki to Hiroshima for the last few days, travelling back to Tokyo on the 28th to catch a plane at Narita that night, but being a little unwell, tired, and worried about transport delays (due to both the snow and earthquake aftermath), we’d decided to instead head back to our comfort zone in Ueno.

• We stopped at Tokyo Station to find something to eat, then transfer to the Yamanote line towards Ueno. Lunch was alright, but was the first place we found that wasn’t so crowded we’d have to wait for a seat.

• We made it back to Ueno, found and checked into our hotel (which was in a different part of the district, closer to the park), then just crashed super hard. Heaven followed by 8hours of travelling takes it out of you!