Today was a transit day, we are leaving Kyoto to head to Hakone to do some hiking and see Lake Ashi. After 2.5hours of travel via bullet and local trains, we arrived at our hotel, Emblem Flow Hakone. It’s a very nice hotel with spacious rooms (for Japan) and has an Onsen. We arrived a bit early for check-in so we went up one of the many hills in town to the local brewery, Gora Brewery. We tried some local beer and had some Wagyu beef gyoza.
After the beer and the snack we headed back got to the hotel with a single-minded purpose, laundry. One thing you may have noticed at this point is we are wearing a lot of the same clothes, up to this point we have been doing laundry in our hotel room sink but they have developed a certain funk that needs to be dealt with. Luckily the laundry machine is right near our room and we could buy laundry detergent for 100 yen. After some R&R while doing laundry we met up with our friend Evan at the Gyoza Center in town for some fried gyoza and beers.
After dinner we found one of the few bars open in town and had several more drinks before they did last call and we had an early night to get ready for our hike in the morning.