Today was all about travel.

We set our alarm to wake up early today to spend a little time with Mizue and our friend Mrs . Takamura, who had come to the airport to transport Robert's family (George, Shaun and Bryan) and friend Murray to Ube airport (about 30 - 40 minutes away) to start their journey home. Haruna, Robert and their friend Steve left on the first Shinkansen (Bullet Train) of the day – they were headed to Kyoto to take in some sights before returning home to Hokkaido.

Murray had the first departure from Ube airport at 1030 to Tokyo Haneda, then taking the local train across town to Tokyo Narita to catch a flight for Minneapolis before connecting home to Winnipeg. George and his sons departed Ube after noon bound direct for Haneda then connecting to Toronto and after a 6 hour wait at Pearson their flight went direct home to Winnipeg.  

After our goodbyes, Eve and I decided to take the short walk to McDonalds (to complete a task for someone at home) and had some breakfast, before returning to the hotel for a shower and to do our final packing for today's trip

We departed Yamaguchi just before noon on the Shinkansen/Bullet Train bound for (Shin)Osaka. On arrival we collected the bag we left behind and left 2 suitcases with the hotel in Osaka we would be staying at in a week on the last night in Asia. We put our Singapore bound suitcase in a storage locker for the afternoon – and for those of you who are counting, our 4^th bag folded up and fit into our Singapore suitcase! 

We purchased a two week "JR Rail" pass prior to our arrival (only available from authorized travel agents outside Japan), which covered all of our travel on the JR Rail lines, including the Shinkansen/Bullet Train . For travel on other local rail lines, we just bought tickets as we needed – all ticket machines have a button to pick English rather than Japanese. The rail lines all have lots of maps available on the platforms and trains in the stations, all in English, showing directions and all sorts of information. 

With no plans for the afternoon, and a few hours to burn, we decided to take the JR train to go back and check out a store we saw last week when we were at the baseball game. It looked like a home improvement store. The reason it intrigued us initially was when we were in Japan 6 years ago we were told Japan didn’t have home improvement/reno type stores as “doing it yourself” would take a job from someone else.  

The “Super Viva Home” store was two floors with lumber, a lot of which was individually wrapped in plastic (like so many items for purchase in Japan), as well as a large selection of plumbing, lighting, heating and home "fix it" supplies. They also had a large selection of housewares, storage and organizational items. Eve had to take a picture of the "Women's section" filled with displays of home appliances such as vacuum cleaners (sigh!)

While in the neighbourhood, we made a quick stop to the Aeon Mall (they seemed to have a few in Osaka as well as Yamaguchi) before making our way back to Osaka to pick our luggage to make our way to Osaka’s Kansai International Airport. We are booked on Singapore Airlines Airbus A330, a 23:30 departure, the "red eye" flight to Singapore. We had to wait a few hours in Kansai Airport, but finally boarded our flight to Singapore, which continues into the next day.