Tome…

21 October 2019

Up at 5 again with lots of time to kill. We did not have to be out of the hotel until 11 and were not picking up the car until 1 PM. not a very exciting morning except for when Kim was trying to avoid me touching him and managed to wedge himself between the bed and the wall. That was hilarious! I couldn’t stop laughing. 😂 We finally ventured down to the desk to get the $10 western breakfast. That was interesting. We had a cheese omelette, sausage, bread products and a few other things that you typically wouldn’t find in any western breakfast, such as a fairly sweet stew. It was fairly good but not what we would have chosen given a choice. We like the buffets that the business hotels typically put out. this must’ve been a fancy hotel to have a breakfast like that!

We left the room at 11 and put our bags in the storage lockers at the front of the hotel then ventured on foot to the covered walkways. We did a little bit of shopping, Kim ate a bowl of Ramen that attacked his shirt and we picked up some Choco Cro to go as we were out of time. We picked up our luggage and then started walking towards the car rental agency. We tried to find a cab on the way but finally gave up and saw two on the very street where the car rental agency was.. Of course… It was quite bright and sunshiny and still quite warm so the 15 minute walk with the heavy packs was not super easy. But we made it! We got all sorts of insurance on the car, packed it up, figured out how the GPS worked and put in a destination to the north east. We then spent about an hour trying to get out of Sendai. We had chosen local route on the GPS so it took us on some fairly interesting, narrow roads. We did make it out of town and were driving in farming country. It is fairly flat in this area with many rice fields and you can see for many kilometers. The rice fields were covered in huge, white birds. Not entirely sure what they were but there were tons of them. We also stopped to get what we thought were apples as we saw many fruit stands with these large golden fruits. When we got our fruit we found out that it was nashi, a Japanese pear. They are super tasty and very juicy. So juicy that Kim’s shirt was anointed anew! We could have a bought the larger size of pear but the size we got were already bigger than a regular apple and once we bit into them we were happy that we only had the small size!

Once we had dealt with all of the pear juice it was time to start looking for a hotel for the night. We were looking for one that had a large bath in it and of the seven that came up only one did in Tome. then we had to try to find it. The GPS did not recognize the phone number of the hotel so we put in the City Hall because we could not put in the hotel itself. Then it took us to some random person’s house. Since we were in the middle of flat country with low buildings we weren’t sure what the hotel looked like but we were pretty sure that it did not look like a personal house. So we went onto our phone’s Google maps, inputted the destination and found it fairly easily. I am not sure what is up with that GPS but it seems like it will be an interesting trip using it.

The hotel is quite nice and included breakfast and free parking. The bathing area is nice as well although it only has one tub. The tub temperature was good so that you could actually stay in for a bit and not be boiled immediately. We also found an amazing restaurant just across the street. Lots of seafood both raw and cooked with my meal. Kim had a Donburi bowl with tempura shrimp. I also had a peach sorbet served in a frozen peach. The place was very fancy with huge chandeliers and the option of private booths with doors. Who knew we would find something like that in the middle of nowhere? After our baths we had a lazy night and off to bed.