Late Start

It's always a late start to the day when there�s high-speed internet in the room.

Also when you ask the hotel concerige to help with arranging lodging in the next town. Or actually the town after the next.

I left two days open (without destination or hotel reservations) in the trip so that if we wanted to be flexible in where we went, we could do so. We decided to head to Nagoya on the way back to Tokyo and I asked the hotel concierge to make some calls to find lodging.

Sold out. Sold out. Soooooold out!

He then brought us some suggestions which were out of our price range. I asked for an internet terminal so I could do a search. No dice. And no business center.

I wound up going to an internet cafe to try to locate a hotel in Nagoya.

Internet cafes here are different. Besides the fat pipe and lots of Pee Cees, there�s a fully stocked library of manga and magazines, free beverages, junk food (cup noodles and chips of all sorts), massage chairs, VIP rooms and they�re open 24/7 pretty much. People who stay out too late at the bars have been known to stay the remainder of the evening at these cafes which is why they have a more expensive rate from 0000 to 0800 on the weekends.

In either case, I had to take about an hour to locate a place to stay. Between that and our helpful concierge who tried to find us a place to stay, we lost two hours. So I call that a late start.