We awoke this morning to some clear skies and sun for the first time in quite a few days. Last night's rainstorm was ferocious, but we are getting near the end of the rainy season and apparently that is quite normal. Hopefully, we will have good weather from here on out. We spent the morning exploring Magome and doing a little shopping in the small shops on the main road. We wandered a bit out of the main town in search of some old castle ruins, which ended up b...

We awoke in Narai after another good night's sleep (sleeping doesn't seem to be a problem on this tour, as we are normally exhausted at the end of the day), the group got back together for a Japanese style breakfast. Once breakfast was over, we headed out for a quick tour of the Narai area. Narai is a "Post Town" on the old route from Kyoto to Edo (Tokyo). During the period that Shoguns ruled Japan, the feudal lords were required to come to Edo once every two y...

We rose quite early this morning, as Christine wanted to go down and take another soak in the hot springs before we left. Kent decided that he would skip that and went for a nice walk in the forest instead, enjoying the peacefulness and the sounds of the birds. This was our first Japanese style breakfast. The Japanese style of breakfast consisted of Miso soup, rice, a salad, a lightly cooked egg (that you mixed with rice and soya sauce), some fish cakes, and ass...

We started our day by walking down to the train station to catch the local train to the main Tokyo station where were boarded the Shinkanzen (the Japanese bullet train) to Nagano. In Nagano, we boarded the local train which took us to Obuse, our first stop of the day. We were excited to get out of the city and up into the Japanese Alps. After dropping our backpacks off in some coin lockers at the train station, we walked through the small town of Obuse. Our fir...

Our last day in Tokyo was also the first full day of our Oxalis Adventures tour. We started out the day with breakfast at the hotel since they had a nice western style buffet. We could have had a Japanese style breakfast, but figured we would be having lots of those in the upcoming days. We then met up with our group to head out for the day. One of our first stops of the day was the Mitsukoshi department store, which is a very traditional, high-end Japanese stor...