Once we'd crossed and alighted at Sakaide there was a twenty minute wait before we made our way back on a common or garden commuter train, not that it diminished the view in too many ways.
Back in Okayama the big question was what to do for the next couple of hours. My own preference was to head for Okayama Korakuen, rated as one of the three best traditional landscape gardens in Japan alongside Kenrokuen in Kanazawa and Kairakuen in Mito, an option that would give us a good sight of nearby Okayama Castle.
Bearing the weather, and particularly the threat of rain, in mind, Madam was inclined to opt for the nearby town of Kurashiki, so we set off in search of the Tourist Information Centre in the station complex to check whether there were further options and sort out the issue.
The woman we spoke to was fairly insistent that Korakuen was the way to go, and a glance at the leaflet about Kurashiki suggested we'd be spending a bit of time in the open there, so there wasn't a great deal of advantage in that direction, so, forced to choose I went for the garden and the castle rather than the neighboring town.
After all, if things got too bad we could always retreat to the station complex.
Once outside, it was a case of umbrellas up, and a choice between a walk down the main street, Motomaro-odori, named after the city's legendary Peach Boy, a character who'd been the subject of some discussion over the preceding day or two, or taking the tram along the same route.
Given the weather, you could easily have opted for the tram, based on the fact that you'd get there quicker and wouldn't be walking through the drizzling mizzle.
As it turned out, that was the way to go. We arrived at the point where both garden and castle were visible as the sun threatened to break through the clouds, and though the umbrellas were unfurled for most of the next hour and a half the weather was better than you would have expected starting out from the station with a forecast of rain developing.
With the weather looking like it might be starting to clear we paused long enough Okayama Castle to gather photographic evidence that we'd been there.
Popularly known as Crow Castle (U-jō), Okayama Castle acquired the nickname due to its black exterior. Japanese castles, like neighbouring Himeji-jō tend to be white). Originally completed in 1597 in the style of the Azuchi-Momoyama Period, destroyed in a bombing raid in 1945 and replicated in concrete in 1966 (except for a single turret which survived the bombing) the reconstruction is much more accurate than most Japanese replicas, since it was rebuilt from the original blueprints.