Our visit to see Mount Fuji was gray and rainy, and Fuji-sighting-less, but a fun day trip. Our morning began with a hectic train ride to Shinjuku station (a morning commuter saw our difficulty with train selection and helped us along our route to make sure the station we changed trains at had sufficient rain cover for us!). Shinjuku station itself has over 60 entries and exits, and making sure we found the appropriate one was a lot in the morning rush at the busiest station in the world (3.6 million average passengers per day in 2018!). Despite being herded by the tour company workers aggressively, we were not close to the last arrivals and thus began our tour in earnest. 

Because of the weather we weren’t going to be seeing much of Mount Fuji, so we stopped at a Fuji visitor’s center to learn about the mountain. Afterwards we took a ferry on a lake and a cable car up a mountain for some views before taking the bullet train back to Yokohama. Fully spent from our day, we indulged in what would become semiregular for us in Japan: grocery store dinners.

Please accept this photo in lieu of an actual photo of Mount Fuji!

A gate on Lake Kawaguchiko

The tour company provided us with individual hot pot for our lunch; we also enjoyed a drum demonstration. 

Live orchids suspended in a completely mirror covered room was definitely a highlight.

A surprising number of these rooms involved getting our feet/calves wet