It's taken me quite a while to put this last post together. Part of it is trying to get back into things here, part wanting for the experience to sink in a bit before reflecting. Instead of a regular blog post, I decided to summarize odds and ends our trip in a series of bullet points, with some final thoughts at the end.

We had two short days on the way to Japan, and we make up for it with a 41-hour day on the way back. We did manage to sneak in an art museum before heading to the airport.

It's come down to this. One more full day in Japan, and about six hours of that going from our Takayama hostel to our Tokyo hotel. We got some great views from the trains, and even managed to get a little sightseeing in.

We're heading into the last stretch of our trip, with this day being the last without travel (we travel to Tokyo the next day, then fly home the day after that). We spent it visiting the old Takayama government building followed by another walking course which went by several temples and shrines. It then went uphill to a park with the ruins of Takayama Castle.

We had two major sights planned for the day. The museum was about a half hour walk to the west of the hostel, and the walking course was about 20 minutes to the east. So we knew we had quite a bit of walking ahead of us, but we were able to break it up into different segments.

For the first of two full days in Kanazawa, we saw one of the Great Gardens of Japan, walked through one of Kanazawa's geisha districts, and tried to finalize the rest of our transportation between cities.

A day of travel and little sightseeing, but we did manage to get from Hiroshima to Kanazawa. What would have been a 7½ our drive took us a little over 6 hours by train. And yes, we hung out at Starbucks for a bit.

Having done a day and a half in Miyajima, it was time to spend some time in Hiroshima. Since our plans were for only one night, we knew we would be doing all of our sightseeing after we arrived in the morning. Everything we went to centered around the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park.

Having already seen a major shrine and a major temple on Miyajima, we decided to go up to the top. We later returned, not only to sea level but below it so we could walk close to the floating torii.

We had one last full day in Kyoto and decided to not pack it too tightly. We did make it to a castle, a garden, and had some really good tempura for dinner.

Starting the second half of our trip, we went to even more temples. We got more familiar with yatsuhashi. And we saw kids taking field trips. Lots of kids, all around.

Having been to the current capital (Tokyo) and the former capital (Kyoto), it was time to visit an even earlier capital of Japan (most of the 8th century, known as the Nara period) and frolic with the deer. Well, we didn't actually frolic.

Yes, we visited another temple today. It had aspects of several others we've seen; built on a mountain like Kiyomizu, took a while to walk through like Kinkaku, and had a long tunnel of torii like Nezu. It was, however, more so for each of those aspects. We also went through another shopping street, Nishiki Market.

Another day of temples for us, in addition to getting more familiar with the Kyoto bus system. And even though we were there when we arrived in the city, we went back to Kyoto station to check out the architecture.

The plan for the day was to do things which would work in the rain since that was the forecast. We continued our walk around Higashiyama and ended up our evening at a demonstration of several forms of Japanese performance art.