Breakfast started arriving just before eight, and it was something I'd had reservations about, but I was ok once I sighted the salmon. Between that and the rice I was sure of enough to keep me going for an hour or three, but I picked at various other bits and pieces, none of which were impressive enough to have me eschewing the Western end of future breakfast Vikings.
And if the Western end doesn't exist as long as there's salmon and rice I'll be cool. I'm rapidly acquiring a penchant for the orange coloured fish that'll go close to matching Madam’s.
We headed back upstairs to pack, and, predictably back down to the lobby to check out and wait for the shuttle transfer to Tsugawa station, as you do when there’s WiFi in the lobby and issues when it comes to accessing it in the room.
The transfer to the station came with a Tsugawa history lesson delivered by the driver was, of course, incomprehensible to your correspondent, so I came to the conclusion that I’d have to do my own. The attempt to do so, once I was reunited with the desktop machine, proved singularly unsuccessful, and delivered a timely reminder that the entire sum of human knowledge hasn’t found its way onto the Web, and there are aspects of regional Japanese history that aren’t accessible to an English-language Google search.
Yet.
Contrary to expectations, we were travelling on from Tsugawa, which I'd been led to believe was the end of the line. Our train the day before had terminated there, but the line did go on, taking a line through Kanose on the other side of the river from last night’s onsen, diving into a tunnel and emerging at Hideya. From there, it passed through the equally obscure localities of Toyomi, Kaminojiri, Nozawa, Onobori, Ogino, and Yamato as we moved from Niigata Prefecture into the nuclearly-known Fukushima Prefecture. We were, however, a comfortable distance from the troubled and troublesome reactor.
At least, I hoped we were.