Friday, March 25th: Itsukushima
We took the JR Sanyo line train and then ferry to Miyajima this morning. It was sunny, cold, and there was snow on the ground in most places making for beautiful photographs. We caught the Itsukushima shrine at near high tide (which is highly recommended) and toured both the shrine and the Miyajima Municipal History and Folklore Museum. The museum is housed in a late Meiji or early Taisho era soy sauce maker's house, and the building itself is a great example of traditional architecture with an excellent garden. It houses lots of artifacts from the local area and has a video and diarama of the September 30th, 1555 battle between Mori and Sue.
We came back to Hiroshima, and picked up our Mazda rent-a-car and parked it at the hotel for the night. Erci is feeling a little ill, so she stayed at the hotel while I went back to the car rental and asked for help programming the GPS navigation system. One lady who was there had grown up a little in Michigan when her dad was working in the state in the automobile industry for a few years, so between her English and my Japanese she followed what I was trying to do the following day and she programmed the whole trip plan into the GPS, include way-points at all the tourism spots we wanted to hit. She was amazing! The GPS talks to us in Japanese, but after a few turns we found we can follow the basics just fine (turn left, turn right, at the next light, in 500 meters, etc).
We came back to Hiroshima, and picked up our Mazda rent-a-car and parked it at the hotel for the night. Erci is feeling a little ill, so she stayed at the hotel while I went back to the car rental and asked for help programming the GPS navigation system. One lady who was there had grown up a little in Michigan when her dad was working in the state in the automobile industry for a few years, so between her English and my Japanese she followed what I was trying to do the following day and she programmed the whole trip plan into the GPS, include way-points at all the tourism spots we wanted to hit. She was amazing! The GPS talks to us in Japanese, but after a few turns we found we can follow the basics just fine (turn left, turn right, at the next light, in 500 meters, etc).
