17th May - Matsumoto to Narita airport and home

Breakfast today was similar to yesterday's and again very tasty. We had our bags all packed and ready for the 9am shuttle into the train station. The rest of the morning was spent on trains - first to Nagano and then a connection to Ueno, Tokyo. 

A quiet beverage on our last train

Our plan here was to drop the bags in a locker and walk to the kitchenware street we know well from previous trips. Shops line each side of the road for a number of blocks, all selling kitchen items of every description. It took a while to find an empty large-sized locker. After finding one, we stacked the bags in and made very careful note of its location within the huge train station, including photographing the locker. We think this is exactly the same block of lockers we struggled to re-find on a previous trip, so this year we took extra care to work out how to retrace our steps. We set off on the 15-minute walk to Kappabashi Street. Unfortunately, it was bucketing down. We still decided to walk instead of finding a bus, and although we got rather wet, our coats and umbrellas dealt with most of the rain.

It was fun being back. It's an amazing area. The specialisation is epic, for example there's a shop that basically sells only the stands that restaurants have outside that display their menu. There must have been 50 variations. Lots of other people were clearly enjoying being here too. Maybe it's become a tourist destination in its own right since we were here a number of years ago or maybe is just a good spot to visit on a rainy day. It was bustling. We hoped to pick up a few items and were happy with what we found, though were a little stymied by those shops which only accepted cash as we had deliberately run ourselves low. We were down to our our last $6 equivalent. It was a bit of a rush to walk back to the train station, but thankfully the rain had stopped. Happily reunited with our bags, we caught a train for the 5-minute ride to Tokyo station.

Our last train of the trip, the 1-hour ride to Narita airport was very smooth and we both fell asleep for a bit. With the last of the rice paddies disappearing into the distance, it was a little sad to farewell the Japanese landscape, but it was with some relief that we arrived at the airport with plenty of time in hand.

An incredibly smooth pathway through check-in, bag-drop (where our cabin bags were weighed to ensure they were under 7kg), security and immigration, we could put our feet up to relax for an hour. Phew. What an adventure it has been!

We're looking forward to a final beef udon noodle dinner on our ZipAir flight as we head to San Francisco!