Thursday, 10 April 2008
The next morning we awoke to be confronted by bleak drizzly weather. When ‘Er Indoors checked the weather forecast of The Mother’s Mobile it wasn’t promising. Seemingly, indoors was the place to be for the next twenty-four hours or so, with rain and wind forecast for Odawara, where’d we be alighting from the shinkansen on a day where the planned agenda included a lot of walking.
We discussed matters over breakfast, as you do in these situations, then headed upstairs to tackle the increasingly-difficult task of fitting everything back into the suitcase and adding the extra items acquired since yesterday morning.
We managed to stay dry by taking the underground route to the station, arriving in plenty of time despite an initial mild case of panic.
Standing on the platform I started to realise how many shinkansen services they fit into a day along the Tokaido corridor. The track next door to our platform had trains departing for Tokyo at 9:10, 9:19 and 9:27. Our train, also to Tokyo (though we were disembarking at Odawara) left at 9:22. in other words, four trains to the same destination leaving in a period of just under twenty minutes.
When we’d booked the day’s seats we’d been told that there were no window seats available (we’d landed Car 12 Seats 13 B&C) but, as it turned out, there was no one in 13A and since no one arrived to claim it we managed to end up with the window seat anyway since the train was travelling express from Nagoya to Odawara, solving a slight luggage problem on a crowded train.
While there are the predictable overhead racks for hand luggage, on most shinkansen there isn’t a designated space for large luggage items (hardly surprising, since making those provisions would create space constraints in other ways) and, once the handy places most people use to stow such items have been filled there isn’t much choice but to squeeze the item into the space between your legs and the seat in front of you.
Fortunately, they’ve allowed plenty of leg room.
As it was, I moved to 13A, Madam occupied 13B and the suitcase had the whole of the space in front of 13C to itself.
Despite the acquisition of the window seat there wasn’t much to see in a landscape misty wet with rain, so I devoted the time to writing up the previous day’s leg of the journey. Outside, the landscape was pretty much like it had been last time we were on the coastal plain, though I noticed a number of structures that seemed to be greenhouses.
Surprisingly, there also seemed to be a little more forest than usual. before we moved back into the familiar urban sprawl just before we reached the bridge across the brackish Hamana Lake, a drowned river valley with its mouth blocked by sand banks.
There were, predictably, plenty of shinkansen heading past in the opposite direction. One minute you’re looking across the landscape, then you’re suddenly hit by a jolt against the window as a silver and blue blur obscures the view, which reappears almost before you’ve had time to blink.
We were seated on the starboard side of the train, but away to the left we had views across to the South Alps on the left, as ‘Er Indoors scanned that side hoping for a glimpse of Mount Fuji. Though spring had well and truly sprung on the lowlands there was plenty of snow on the peaks.
We passed extensive tea plantings on slopes where rice cultivation would have been out of the question, as well as on flat ground. It was probably a case of totally-misguided optimism, but it seemed that the weather away to our right was lifting though there was still heavy cloud over the mountains away to our left.