That, in turn, delivered us to the hotel just after three-thirty, where we found the same girl who'd enjoyed a holiday on the Gold Coast when she was little on hand to convey our baggage to the room.
You don't need to be Einstein to figure out how the next hour and a bit was filled in, but just before five I put the tapping to one side as we made our way downstairs towards the evening's dinner rendezvous.
The notion that Madam might head out by herself to pick up supplies of green tea with Hughesy to follow on a later shuttle for a six o'clock rendezvous had been floated earlier, but I ended up tagging along for the shopping expedition.
Which is just as well, because it turned out I didn't know the route between the point where the bus deposited us and the JR ticket office as well as I thought I did.
The shopping bit took us into the basement of Sogo, a major department store, and Madam left me to peruse the shelves at a handy wine store.
The subject of Australian wine, and an obviously low profile in what I've seen of mainstream Japanese society was something we returned to over dinner, and given the fact that the subject impinges on one of Hughesy's major obsessions it's worth going into here.
Now, I have to admit I haven't done extensive research on this, but I've kept my eyes open as we've moved around, and sightings of anything approaching a familiar label have been on the very occasional side of few and far between.
In the wine shop whose shelves got a reasonably thorough perusal they identified countries of origin by flags on the price tag and I didn't sight a single Australian flag.
Before our cousins across The Ditch start gloating, while I did spot a Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc it took a very careful and rather lengthy search to locate a second.
A couple of hours later I was jotting down the names of a couple of Australian wineries that would be worth looking for, but I wouldn't be holding my breath as far as finding anything from Cullen, Grosset, Rockford and Coldstream Hills is concerned.
It was more an exercise of hope rather than an expectation of success, but you never know. Our hostess might do better with Brown Brothers, and I suppose Jacobs Creek is always a likely sighting, but based on very basic research I wouldn't be holding great hopes of success.
Once we'd been ushered into a shoes off private booth I was relieved to find there was space for legs under the table, and the next couple of hours were comfortable with the food arriving in a steady flow of little dishes. I managed to attack most of them with chopsticks, reserving the fork that was delivered just in case for the bits that were too tricky when it came to basic chopstick skills.