We had a bit of a sleep in this morning – waking up about 8.00.  We got ourselves organised and went to find somewhere for breakfast.  We ended up downstairs in the train station, finding a small cafe.  I had a caesar salad with a waffle and Kaoru had (thick) toast with ham and egg on top.  We had almost completed the walk to the nearest JR station, so we decided to go the rest of the way and buy Kaoru’s Shinkansen ticket back to Tokyo.  It meant we didn’t have to be at Shinosaka with enough time to wait in a long line, so allowed our day to be a bit more relaxing.

We went back to our room to plan our day and shower, and checked out a bit before 11.  We left our bag at reception and caught the train (well, 2 trains) to Osaka castle.  It was a long walk from the station to the castle, and another long walk from the gates to the castle itself.  We got an ice cream to cool us down, as it was about 30 degrees.  We caught the elevator to the 5th floor, and walked up to the 8th, did the walk around the observation deck, and then walked down and looked at the exhibits of each floor.

We went back to the hotel the same way we came to the castle.  We had already completed 7000 steps and hadn’t even had lunch!  We got our suitcase and caught the train to Shin-Osaka, where we finally had some lunch.  We had Okonomiyaki, at the same restaurant we had it at on our way home from Kobe in March.  We caught a 3.15 Shinkansen back to Tokyo.

I spent the whole trip back to Tokyo doing Fitgenes work.  I started with a phone call to Leigh, and then had a number of little tasks.  We arrived at Shin-Yokohama about 5.50.  It took us 2 more local trains to arrive at Seijokuen-mae at 7.15 (we deliberately took a slower-than-normal train to save waiting too long at the end), and met Kozue and Minami.  Kenichi arrived 5 minutes later, and we went for dinner at their local Korean restaurant.  Kenichi had done several trips to Korea with his business so we let him order everything.  At about 9.30 Kozue and Minami went out to pick Yukari up from school, and then she ate, and we had a couple more drinks.

We didn’t realise how late it was, but we finally left and caught a taxi back to Mio’s.  We got home after 11, and everybody was in bed.  Ange started barking so Mio let her out of their room so she could see us.  We tried to be as quiet as possible, and went to bed.