[Chris reporting, a few days after the fact]
Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head … Took the train across town to the main Tokyo train station, stored our suitcases and bought our airport train tickets. From there, we headed over to the Imperial Palace, which is basically an island (approximately a square mile) surrounded by a huge moat. Inside are gardens, huge walls upon walls, and somewhere in there is an imperial palace which we don’t get to see. This picture shows one of the gates through the walls. As you can see, it was raining — crappy weather characterized the last couple days of our trip. Fortunately we did have OK weather at the beginning and fantastic weather in the middle.
Took our first and only taxi ride of the entire trip back to the train station (in soooo much pain …). We had a few minutes to kill before heading to the airport, so I bought us a platform ticket to the shinkansen platforms. If I wasn’t going to get to ride a bullet train on this trip, I was at least going to see one. Saw several, coming and going, Very sleek.
Went to the airport, got on the airplane, saw CRAP movies (War Of The Worlds, Dark Water, please kill me), got home, unloaded all of the SWAG out of our suitcases.