Day 19. 26th May 2016. Thursday.

We woke up to our last day at the Highland Resort and headed straight down to the wonderful breakfast area and the lovely views of Mt Fuji in distance . Again, a cloudy days, so no clear views of the peak which made me realize how lucky we were to have had spectacular views of the peak on the day we arrived. We had forwarded our luggage the previous day to the airport hotel at Narita (the Narita Gateway Hotel) and so we didn't have much to pack, just a few overnight bags.  Check out was smooth and easy, and soon we were on our way, the last car ride to Otsuki Station.

It was about a 25 minute drive, but we wanted to fill gas in the car before dropping it off. Googlemaps has a nifty feature that shows you where all the gas stations enroute are, so I told Godwin to wait until we got to one just before the Nissan drop off stop. Unfortunately, it was supposed to be a Shell gas station, but I couldn't see any pumps as we drove past. I told Godwin to pull over and walked back to find a tiny Japanese woman (who spoke no English) behind a counter and managed to convey to her that we wanted to fill gas in car (which was nowhere to be seen since Godwin had driven past!) She said yes, yes, we have gas, so I signaled to him to drive back, and then lo and behold, she pulled pipes out from the ceiling and filled the tank! I'm assuming they do this to save space, but I thought it was pretty brilliant . She was very very helpful, cleaned our windshield, etc and soon we were off to the Nissan place to drop off the car where we met another lovely helpful Japanese woman who said we should probably get a taxi to the station with the kids even though it was 5 minutes away. And she was right, there was no pavement to walk, so I'm glad she called the cab (an ancient weird looking black model car with an even weirder driver but he got us there). We bought tickets at the tiny Otsuki station for Akhihara, and the boys settled in for the ride (about 1.5 hours).

When we got to Akhibara, there was a bit of a problem. We intended keeping our bags in the lockers while we shopped and checked out the area. Unfortunately, all lockers had these notices stuck on them: For security reasons, coin operated lockers in this station will not be in use from May 25th to the 27th. There were even stickers on trash cans that said for security reasons, trash containers will not be available to use . I wasn't able to find out for sure what the reason for all the added security was but figured it had to do something with the fact that President Obama was in Japan and there was a summit with many world leaders attending. Finally, we exited the station, went to the mall attached, found a place for grandma to park herself with all the bags, and set off to explore.

Tokyo's electric town certainly was buzzing with energy. We had to check out Yodobashi, only the ground zero for all things electrical. Godwin was in heaven. I bought some earpods for my phone, and Godwin picked up some other stuff. We bought some Star Wars merchandise for the kids. The boys interacted with some robots. No, we didn't buy one. Then we walked past the Gundam Cafe and the AKB48 cafe, which are next to each other. We didn't go inside as the boys weren't interested, but this is a brilliant area to walk about. I was very amused by the girls in the maid outfits handing out leaflets all over the place. From here, we found ourselves in Don Quijote, which was really interesting. You get all kinds of weird stuff here. We didn't have too much time to wander and the boys were getting cranky, so we decided to head back to the mall for some last minute shopping. On the way, we found this guy in the street selling ham and cheese sandwiches in the shape of a fish. They were quite yummy. Then, back to the mall, more shopping and we decided to get back to the station .

I had to go stand in the queue to buy the narita express tickets and managed to get the last train out of the station. There was still time for the train to depart, so we asked this railway employee who had helpfully pointed out where the tickets were sold to suggest some dinner places. He said the best bet would be in the station itself. We found a lovely cafe and ordered some food and relaxed before it was time to rush back to the platform. When we got to the right platform, there was a train waiting to depart, and the entire platform full of people got on it. It didn't look like the Narita express to me, and I was discussing with Godwin if we should check if thats our train, when this lovely Japanese woman who was already seated inside came out and told me ours was the next train. She must have seen us looking a tad confused. Very nice of her. Anyway, that is Japan, courteous and kind. Zach, Zane and me went to the vending machine to buy the last of our favourite drinks, Asahi beer for me, coke for Zane and Kirin lemon ice tea for Zach . And then the train arrived. And when we got on, it was almost empty. Besides us, there was a Japanese businessman and two girls in the front, I think American, who were on their phone calling the airlines to let them know they were late and could they please not close the check in counters as they were on the way. When the train stopped at Narita, they made a mad dash out of there. I have no idea what happened after, but after listening to them begging and pleading on the phone for the past 45 minutes, I do hope their story ended well.

Then, we walked the long walk to the exit area, and found the place to wait for the shuttle to take us to the airport hotel. It was a pretty long wait, for some reason all the other shuttles of the other hotels keep pulling in. Ours finally came, we got in, got to the hotel, checked in, and settled in for the night. Our suitcases were already here and they wasn't much packing to do.

Everyone was sad it was our last night in Japan. We had had a lovely time. The boys wanted me to start planning their next holiday already.

Coming up: back to Goa.