To Hiroshima

Dear Elliot, Emmala and Eliza,

Today we traveled a long way on four different trains to get all the way from the northern part of the island to the southern part. We went through many Japanese Cities, including Sendai, Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka and Hiroshima. We left Rachel and Mike's at 6 in the morning and got on our first train at 6:49. We got off of the train in Hiroshima at 4:34 in the afternoon, so we spent most of the day riding trains. We got to ride on four different types of trains. Three of them were shinkansen bullet trains.

Misawa train 2
Our first train was the little Misawa train.

Then we boarded the Hayabusa in Hachinohe. It is a modern, E5 series shinkansen, the fastest in Japan. We went all the way to Tokyo on that train.

JR_Central_Shinkansen_700
In Tokyo, we changed to the Hikari, which is a N-700 series train. It is a little bit older and a bit slower, but reaches speeds in excess of 90 miles per hour, which is pretty fast - way faster than you would drive in a car.

sakura shinkansen
We rode that train to Kobe, where we changed to another N-700 train. This was a smaller version of the train we had just been riding on. We only had 8 minutes to change trains in Kobe, and in that time our first train arrived and left, then another train came and went and finally the third train was the one we took - all in just 8 minutes! We rode this train to Hiroshima.

Shinkansen_Sakura_number_standard-sized_car_reserved_seat_(N700_series_No._8000_stand)
Here is a picture of the inside of the last train that we rode on. All of the trains are very comfortable with plenty of room for luggage and lots of room to sit.

It was too cloudy for us to see Mount Fuji, which was a bit of a disappointment, but we will get another chance to look at it on our last day in Japan when we will ride the train from Kyoto to Tokyo and from Tokyo to Narita airport.

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