One of our adventures while in Tokyo was to a town called Hakone. This is a hour and a half 'bullet' train ride away from Tokyo. On Sunday morning we woke up to blue skies and cool temperatures so we thought we would snap up the opportunity. The tour desk gal at the hotel was not too reassuring since we were not starting our day till 9:30 based on the little one taking a nap, but we knew we had no expectations so we would just go with the flow. And that we did. One of the exciting parts of the day was we traveled on 8, yes 8 different means of transportation and what a PERFECT day it turned out to be. So here is our fun day in pictures.
Here is Addison not looking so confident in her Mom and Aunt Ginger about the day to come.
We packed her away in her stoller and headed off by foot to the subway station (Number 1 of the transportation). We took two different lines of the subway to get to Tokyo Station to buy our Pass to explore Hakone. (Number 2)
After we bought our tickets, we headed to where our 'Bullet' train was going to take us to the town of Hakone. It was called the 'Romance Car'. (Number 3)
After almost an hour and half on this 'Bullet' train we had to transfer to the Hakone Tozan Train. This was not as nice as our first train and not as fast. We got to ride on this for almost a half hour winding up the mountain. (Number 4)Once we arrived to the 'shopping' district of Hakone it was lunchtime for Addison and ourselves so we found a little place to eat and snacked on curry and chinese noodles.


After our satisfying lunch we headed to our next mode of transportation, the Cablecar, this took us about 10 minutes continuing up the mountain. (Number 5) You can not tell in the picture, but people were stepping on each others toes to get on this thing. Good thing we had the stroller to give us an extra inch of space.
Once we arrived at the last stop of the cablecar, we headed onto the 'Ropeway', or Gondala. (Number 6) Here is a view of where Mt. Fuiji should be, one of the main reasons for going to Hakone is for the view, but the clouds had a different idea for us that day.
Here are our chariots that took us to the top of the mountain we were on and down into a valley towards our next line of adventure. We got to ride these for about a total of half an hour.Once we got off of our Gondala's we had our pirate ship waiting to take us away. (Number 7) We even got our pictures taken with an Asian pirate, who knew they exsisted ;-)
Since we had been hoping along most of the day we thought we would treat ourselves to the First Class Cabin on the 'ship'. It was very nice and was one of our less populated areas of travel. Ginger was able to capture some great pictures of the sun going down along the water. See our photo album for more pics.After our 20 minute boat ride we docked into a town called Hakone-Machi where we caught our last ride on the tour, a good old bus. (Number 8) Here is a picture of two very chilly girls. Once that sun went behind the mountains it got pretty chilly. Thanks Ging for the coat for Addison, not sure what we would have done without it!


We waited the longest for the bus out of all of our rides and being as it was the end of the day and getting colder we forgot to snap a picture of it until we were settled into our Romance Car to head back towards Tokyo. So here is a picture of our last means of transportation to end a perfect day in Hakone.
As we boarded the 'Bullet' train back home Ginger mentioned how it felt like we were on the amazing race as we were going from one thing to the next all day racing the crowds to get a good spot, so that is why I had to title this blog the way I did.




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