Rachel's Next Adventure

Another early start this morning, a couple of hours earlier than yesterday I think. We had to quickly finish packing up our stuff that we'd needed in the morning before heading down to the front desk to check out and pay for the room. We then rushed out into the station so we could grab something from the shop (we got a Hiroshima baseball team tshirt each) before heading over to the Shinkansen section of the station to catch our train to Osaka. Our first stop in Osaka was to grab something to eat as it was now around 10:30am and we'd been up for hours by now! Plus we didn't know when our next opportunity to eat would be, so we just grabbed something from the Station and put our bags in the lockers (this took a while because pretty much every locker was taken!) before heading over to the Naruto Exhibition. The exhibition took a lot longer than we'd planned out that it would as we had to queue for over an hour just to get in! I didn't expect it to be so p

Rabbit Island Today was our day in Hiroshima, although we never managed to see Hiroshima as we'd planned to, we did manage to get to Okunoshima and Miyajima. The queue for Okunoshima was so long we didn't get on until the third ferry, so it took a big chunk of time away from our timetable. It also effected the experience somewhat as there were so many people on the island most of the rabbits had had enough food for a while so you never got to experience crowds of rabbits run out at you for your food. It was also near enough mid day so the rabbits were cooling down in the bushes for quite a lot of the time, although some did come out for food and we even managed to find a small one that I don't think anyone had seen for quite a while. I shook my bag of food and this little bunny ran out of the bushes behind me! Rabbit Island is definitely one of my highlights from the trip, I loved feeding them, even though most of them wouldn't let you touch them. We did find two

We had an early start in the morning as we had to catch the shinkansen to Kyoto at 6:48 from Tokyo Station so we had to get there first. We left the hotel around 6am. View from the shinkansen We arrived in Kyoto around 9:47am, and our first task was to find the coin storage lockers so we could get rid of our over backpack and just spend the day carrying around our day backpack and my camera bag. Fushimi Inari Shrine We then headed over to the Fushimi Inari Shrine, but just as we arrived it started raining, very heavily. My umbrella was too small for the both of us so my fiancé bought a new one, we then went on the hunt for somewhere to eat lunch while we waited for the rain to stop.  After lunch the rain had stopped and it didn't restart again for the entire day, this meant we had a large umbrella to carry around with us though, but thankfully, pretty much every shop and restaurant in Japan has an umbrella holder at their entrance so you don't

We had an early start the morning after we climbed Mt Fuji, it takes a while to get back to Tokyo from Kawaguchiko so we got the earliest and quickest train we could find once we got up. We managed to find a Ltd Express train (quicker and meant we had less transfers) but we didn't manage to get a seat until pretty much the end of our journey as we hadn't reserved seats for this train. We were not sure if we were going to stay the night after the climb or head straight back to Tokyo, so we hadn't prebooked or planned a way back to Tokyo until we got back to the hotel after our climb. Once we got back to Tokyo we headed over to our hotel in Ikebukuro to sort out our stuff before heading out. We dropped off our hiking equipment with the front desk who called Yamato Transport to come and collect it. With everything at our hotel sorted, we headed out for food and then over to Akihabara, I wish we had more time to spend here later in the trip. The streets

An early start ready to catch the bus and start climbing that mountain! Although, now that its over with I wish we'd taken an earlier bus, you'll see why later in this post. We arrived at the 5th station around 9:15am, picked up our sticks, had a little look around and a bathroom stop before starting our hike up to the top of the mountain. We rushed it at first and we're out of breath way before the 6th station, at one point a woman said to me 'slow and steady' before speeding passed me. Funnily enough though, around 5-10min later she turned back and went back down the mountain! We can only assume its because she's a speedy hiker but has no interest in the actual climbing parts. At first I hated the climbing parts, but they were actually the easiest, quickest parts and soon became my favourite. I have no interest in hiking, especially not in the heat, its way too tiring. Unfortunately, the height and air dropping didn't

During our trip to Mt Fuji we stayed at the Plaza Inn Kawaguchiko hotel, its opposite the train station which is where you can catch the bus to the Fuji 5th station so it is ideally located and it was a pretty cheap nightly rate too. The only problem I had here was about the area, but i'd already read a little bit about it before hand, basically, as its like a small town community, everything closes early except the Konbini's, so its recommended you eat before 5pm, we arrived after 5 and our hotel doesn't have a restaurant so we ended up eating snacks from 7 eleven for dinner the two days we were there. The hotel has a curfew which was either 11pm or 11:30pm, so if you need to be out later than that you need to stay somewhere else. Otherwise this was a great hotel, with friendly staff in an ideal location for climbing Mt Fuji. We even had a view of Mt Fuji from our room, on the first morning anyway, on the second morning the visibility was too bad to see Fuji, so I

We spent the morning packing to change hotel again in the evening, and once that was done we headed over to Sunshine City where we had a quick visit to NamjaTown, like our trip to J-World we just bought standard entry tickets and didn't try out any of the attractions. I don't think we even spent an hour there if i'm honest, we were starting to run out of time before our next train, so we had to skip NekoBukuro and sadly never managed to fit it in before we left Japan. We grabbed some lunch and then headed over to the Coldstone Creamery where my fiancé got a Cooley so I could have the Boruto postcard, sadly they didn't have the special Boruto Cooley tumblers anymore. We then took the train over to Kawaguchiko where we checked into our new hotel for the next two nights, the Plaza Inn Kawaguchiko, before getting an early night ready for our climb the next morning. Although, thanks to O2 I was awoken at 1:30am when one of their call centres de

Benten-do  We headed out early in the morning to Ueno Zoo, we decided to walk through the park to get to the zoo and stumbled across Benten-do. This wasn't part of our to do list, we didn't even know it existed, although we were planning on visiting Sensō-ji later in the day. We decided to have a quick look around the temple and lit a couple of incense before heading on to Ueno Zoo. Not far passed the Temple we found a little family of turtles having a little swim, I couldn't get a good photograph but we spent around 10-15min watching them and the fish going up and down, its not something we get to see where we live. Ueno Zoo I really enjoyed my time at this zoo but I really thought it was missing something. It's not quite like any other zoo i've been in before, a lot of the animals were in double cages and it made them really difficult to photograph, especially the flamingos, I don't think i've ever seen them caged before,

Shibuya We decided to spend the late morning and early afternoon in Shibuya, we were running late because we'd had to change hotels back in the morning so we'd lost a couple of hours coming back from Maihama. We headed for lunch by the JR station before we headed to Shibuya. I got a Youkai Watch fry belt clip. The main reason we took a trip to Shibuya was so we could visit the popup Naruto shop in Parco. To be honest, I was a bit let down by this store, i'd seen loads of photographs online of the shop but they just didn't seem to have as much stuff when we went, but the store was due to close a week later. There is a Boruto limited shop opening in Tokyo at the end of the month, but sadly we're already back home. On the way to Parco we paid a quick visit to a UFO arcade, the first one of the trip. My fiancé won me a big, cuddly Rascal Racoon, although he looks angry, I absolutely love him and there was no way we were leaving him behind. Back in

We originally were planning on just travelling from our hotel in Ikebukuro to Disney every morning but after realising it would mean getting around four ours sleep a night for three nights it just didn't seem practical so we set out about looking for a hotel closer to Disney. We originally tried the official Disney Hotels but all they had left were suites, then we tried the partners but they were expensive for what they were with such little benefits of staying there, then we found the MyStays Maihama. The hotel was well reviewed on TripAdvisor and only a 10minute walk away from DisneySea at a decent price it was an obvious no brainer, we booked up this hotel straight away! We had to get separate beds (you'll see more of this the more we change hotel, it seems pretty standard in a Japanese hotel room to only do twin rooms rather than doubles, but in some cases, these were just the only rooms they had left). The hotel was pretty great, clean room, comfy beds and pill

This was our third and final day at Tokyo Disney Resort, we'd bought a matching pair of tshirts so we'd fit in with everyone else (seriously, pretty much every couple and group of friends were wearing matching or identical tshirts and outfits! if we did that back home we'd definitely get some weird looks!) We started our day over at DisneySea, we missed out on Toy Story Mania Fastpasses again though! On the way we passed the Stitch liner monorail, later in the day we finally got to ride it on our way to Ikspiari. Our first stop in DisneySea was the popcorn stall outside of Cape Cod Cook-Off as we wanted to try chocolate popcorn but it was closing when we got there the night before. The popcorn was horrible. Because we didn't like it we then tried the white chocolate popcorn, it was worse, it tasted sort of cheesy. I actually feel a little sick thinking about it. I spent the morning in DisneySea taking photographs as i'd not taken m

We ended up being a little late this morning, and missed rope drop by around 20min or so. Our hotel is closer to DisneySea than it is Disneyland so the walk was pretty quick and somewhat scenic, we walked passed a sports center and some other local community places which just made us wonder why our city can't have anything like that. I think i'll end up posting a rant about our city at some point on here, because our city is horrible, basically your only options of things to do after 5pm is drink. We don't drink, but the reason our city is full of alcoholics and kids drinking on the streets is because there is nothing being offered for entertainment in the entire city. Yeah we have a bowling alley and a swimming pool (Olympic, not leisure) and a single skatepark, but bowling and swimming could cost you a fair bit and families these days don't seem to have a lot of spare money to give their kids for these activities. We have a beach, but the fair was closed years ag

Our first full day started by a 4am wake up! We headed over to the JR station and caught a couple of trains over to Maihama! The connection at Shin Kiba was absolutely packed, i've not been on a train that crowded since I used to take the 8:02 to college, thankfully though, 90% of the people on the train were getting off at Maihama! First stop was the luggage lockers, as we were changing hotel later in the day, then it was straight off to Tokyo Disneyland! The park was busier than i've ever seen a Disney park before! And i've visited Paris and California in August, and Disney World the first two weeks of September! Our first view of the castle as we entered the park. Our first stop was Tomorrowland where we picked up some drinks and sat with our maps while we decided what to do first, my fiancé then ran off to try and get us priority seating for Once Upon A Time before grabbing us some Pooh's Honey Hunt fastpasses (although we ended