The day started according to plan. I made it to the train station on time. But what I didn’t realize was that my train was a one car train. Not an engine and a car but a combination engine car. One car. Apparently these things used to be quite common in Japan, but now they’re quite rare. So people ride on them just to remember the good old days.
As I was walking into the train station a tour bus showed up. Little did I know that everybody on that bus was going to be on my one-car train. If I was smart I would beat them onto the train. As it was I ended up with the last seat on the train. I had a view of the bathroom. Not the ocean which was my “plan”.
Next on my “plan” was to stash my bag and bus it to Shiretoko National Park. Not a problem. Bus was leaving directly. But there wasn’t a returning bus. Because it’s Sunday.
Okay. Four hours until check in at the hotel. According to Google, there is a Town Museum 2 km away. Google says that the way is flat. So off I go. (I dropped my bag off at my hotel hoping maybe they’ll let me check in early. No such luck)
Well the town museum was open and it was a great little museum. The museum must not have a very tight statement of collections, which makes it kind of fun for the visitors. But kind of a nightmare for the curators.
They have train stuff, a good collection of artifacts from the original people of this area dating back 2-3 thousand years, they have old appliances, more pinned butterflies than I have ever seen, parade floats and stuffed animals (taxidermied) and skeletons.
I was the only person in the whole museum well except for person at the desk. While I’m walking back towards my hotel, I realize that I’ve seen maybe two or three cars the whole time. I’ve gone 2 km. I also noticed that the restaurants are all closed. There are no people in this town. Well I did see a guy working on some rose bushes. All right, there are people.
Check into the hotel.
Looking out my hotel room window.
Or maybe this is actually a computer simulation and parts of it got stuck in the Cloud Strike software snafu.
It wasn’t the day I planned but it was a good day .