Day 5

Well we started the day with climbing up hikone castle, that was pretty cool. It's a gigantic fortress on the top of a very large hill in downtown hikone. Instead of going inside I roamed around the entire area around it and did some exploring, went some places I probably shouldn't have, scaled the side of the hill, fell a couple times, nothing out of the ordinary for me. At one point I thought I lost track of time and climbed up and down the large stone steps to find that I definitely still had a good 45 minutes. That was great, at least I got a workout. Once we got together, we realized that one of us was missing (evidently still exploring up in the castle) and Chris and Gino and I, the three smokers sprinted up the hill yet again to find him. Awesome. Anyways, the rest of the day was wonderful, did some more grocery shopping and then went to a hot spring, that made the entire day. I felt like a wet ramen noodle afterwards, in the words of my good friend Brian Mcshane "Bowsh"