I had the Chardonnay with the pasta, and thought it was pretty much in the same flavor profile as he new wave Australian takes on the variety, more than likely a Burgundy style (at this point we'd been told what was available, but not where it was from).
With lunch concluded we still had over an hour to kill, and an inquiry about origins of wine had the proprietor proudly hauling bottles out of the wine fridge. He had a right to be proud, because for a restaurant in a small provincial town in northern Japan it was a bloody good range.
That turned into a conversation about wine that could have gone on for a while, but when a couple of customers who'd eaten in the private room on the other side of the entrance turned up to pay their bill we took the advantage to escape. The rest of the waiting time passed in the waiting room at Takanosu station, a spell long enough to bring the narrative more or less up to date.
The next leg involved a connection on a local line that brought us down to Higashi-Noshiro, where we boarded the rather splendidly named Resort Train #5. Actually looking at the train itself you'd think there wasn't that much different or special about it.
Once you're aboard, however, two things become obvious. The first is that you've got legroom over and above what you'd reasonably expect. I suspect this has something to do with the Resort bit in the train's name, since you'd expect holidaymakers to be carrying a bit more baggage than the average traveller.
The second is the not quite ceiling to floor picture windows, which were the reason why we were here. Looping around the northwest corner of Honshu we'll be looking across the Sea of Japan towards the setting sun, and windows that stretch from just below he overhead luggage rack to below the arm rest are going to maximize the viewing options.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the way things panned out. The sun was shining, albeit rather reluctantly, when we left Higashi-Noshiro, but the cloud cover kicked in big time before we hit the coastline and although the fat old Sun was out there somewhere, he was lurking behind a bank of clouds that ruled out anything that resembled an actual sunset.
Although that was the case the views out across a strangely tranquil ocean that presented an interesting contrast to the obvious anti-erosion work taking place along the actual coastline. That was obvious because the railway line hugged the coast, sometimes with a road in between wheels and water, sometimes, quite literally, looking from picture window almost directly down onto the beach.