Day visitors, on the other hand, are going to want to stay as long as possible and leave with enough time to reach their evening destination before dinner time which means that regardless of how crowded the boat was on the way over, it's going to be packed on the way back.
We're not talking absolutely packed to the extent that you see in news footage from Bangladesh Desh or Indonesia, where crowded ferries crop up in news bulletin footage, usually in the wake of some maritime disaster involving severely overcrowded vessels. But it's a situation where, assuming the licenced capacity of the ferry involved is 1250 passengers, the crowd, and the queue situation means they won't stop admissions to the vessel before 1249 and won't allow it to reach 1251.
I had momentary visions of the capacity limit being reached as Madam was allowed aboard with Yours Truly left behind for the following service, but we both passed the checkpoint, and headed aboard. She wanted to take a few more photos so I found a seat as she headed upstairs. There was one spare beside me but it was gone by the time she made her way downstairs.
Back on the mainland, with the Little Red Travelling Bag retrieved from the coin locker we headed across to the platform we'd arrived on and waited for the commuter train that would deliver us back into Hiroshima a good twenty-six or seven hours after we'd arrived.
That got us into the main station complex, and a shortish walk delivered us to the Hotel Urbain Executive, where we were spending the night. Don't be deceived by the title, though. It might have been Urbain, rather than Urbane, but it was another in the string of places we'd stopped that cater to the travelling salaryman trade, but it had one significant difference from the standard version.
Once you left the security of the lift that brought you to your designated floor you were in the open air, and remarkably crisp, fresh and breezy open air it was as we made our way to the room. It was sort of like a multi-storey version of the standard motel, with the units warped around a central space in a more or less triangular manner with open space looking down into the lobby where the car parks would otherwise have been.
Such establishments offer a variety of enticements to attract the business trade, and in this case the variants included free drinks (of the non-alcoholic variety, of course), for guests only, downstairs and a free laundry rather than the standard coin laundry. We had a load of washing that needed attention, so that solved the issue nicely, but the fact that she was outdoors as soon as she left the warmth of the room meant she won't be booking us in there again.
With the laundry done and dusted we headed off to dinner. Madam was determined to sample one of Hiroshima's trademark dishes, and steered us past a number of other possibilities into the station complex, where we found her preferred option was packed, and it's cousin brother further down the corridor was the same with a few more thrown in for good measure.
I wasn't over keen on what I was seeing as we'd gone past the first time, but if the Tour Director has set her mind on one particular format for dinner experience suggests it's futile to resist, so we inquired about space for two and were rewarded with a space at a bar at the rear of the premises, right beside (actually, left beside from the seated point of view) the cash register.
So if what follows appears to be a little jaundiced, consider my situation.
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