Monday, 12 November 2012
Tired.
That was the key word about two-thirds of the way around the day's exercise routine, and with one final day's exertion to go as I sit typing on a Tuesday morning where the forecast says cloudy in the morning, later turning to rain, that's just as well.
The day's assignment seemed straightforward enough on the surface. A late rise after a big sleep made sense, since we wanted to avoid the morning press of salarymen and other workers making their way into central Osaka. A morning transfer to Kyoto made sense, since it would leave the afternoon free for sightseeing, and an evening without appointments would probably leave us fresh to face a more adventurous schedule on Tuesday, after which it was all a downhill run, so to speak, with Wednesday taking us back to Kobe and Thursday devoted to preparations and packing prior to the return Down Under.
That's pretty much downhill all the way from here, folks.
Of course, there were complications along the way. The first came when The Mother's Phone started making buzzing noises. Given the linguistic issues involved I passed the Incoming message to Madam, who was otherwise (naturally, in an expression of Murphy's Law) engaged in the bathroom. Equally, given the fact that it was probably a text message rather than a voice call, it wasn't that urgent, so someone had time to complete the morning ablutions.
Checking, she established it was a message from a rather concerned Sponge, who we wanted to catch up with, whose communications had been overwhelmed by spam and had, in turn, been waiting to hear from us. We, of course, had been away from email access for the best part of a week, so there wasn't much we could do in terms of contacting him.
In any case, the flurry of text messages following that initial contact established that he was off to Himeji early on Tuesday morning, which effectively ruled out Monday night, and whatever happens on Tuesday is going to depend on how he feels at the end of a longish working day.
Still, that meant we 'd managed to shine a bit of light on the last remaining issue that needed to be resolved, so we duly packed up and set off for Kyoto. That wasn't such a major operation after the transition from lugging the Black Monster to carrying the Little Red Travelling Bag, but we were reminded of the way things could have been as we made our up and down staircases and in and out of subway carriages.
Around ten in the morning things weren't quite as hectic as they would have been an hour and a half earlier, but we made the subway transition to Umeda and the Hankyu connection to Kobe without too much difficulty. I hadn't quite been on the ball the night before when we were headed into the Spanish eatery and the party space across the road was operational, but we passed that particular side street on the way to the subway station so I grabbed a quick photographic record along the way….