In any case, with a clear view to the front and away to the south, and a pretty clear view over to the left we set off, starting off with a sharpish left hand turn out of the station, and heading off through the usual edge of a large Japanese landscape of residential development, light industrial activity and scattered paddy fields you'll find all across the archipelago, with the rice paddies gradually gaining the upper hand as you head away from the city.
The eager bridge-crosser will, predictably, be scanning the horizon for signs of bridges, which are singularly lacking for the early part of the journey. Then you hit a series of tunnels, predictably expecting you'll emerge from this one with a sight of the sea, and, hopefully, a bridge, but you don't sight the water until Kojima, the last station before Shikoku, and still comfortably short of the bridge itself.
Given the weather conditions we were expecting to be at least a tad disappointed, but as we made our way onto the first bridge it was obvious we were getting a magnificent sight on a less than optimal day, and while the spectacle could have been better everything was, under the circumstances, rather more than merely satisfactory.
Given the research I'd done I was expecting a series of bridges, since the material was careful to enumerate and identify the half dozen components, more than likely (or so I theorized) touching down on the intervening islands before launching off and upwards onto the next. That might be the way we'd approach thee matters in Australia or elsewhere, but the Japanese seem to like big statements when it comes to technology and engineering so the individual components merge into a contiguous whole.
A couple of times on the way across you'll register the presence of an island as you pass. There's one spot where you can actually see trees around eye level, but apart from that there's no way of telling where one of the component bridges ends and the next begins.
And it wouldn't be a good idea to try. Looking down to spot islands and identify starts and finishes would draw your attention away from what was, even on a day when the conditions were less than optimal, quite magnificent. It was something that had me pencilling in a return trip at some point in the future, hopefully in better conditions and more than likely as part of a longer exploration of Shikoku.
Under such circumstances (assuming there's a rail pass involved) you'd get two bites of the cherry a couple of days apart because there might be three bridges connecting Honshu and Shikoku but only one carries rail traffic.