Going to Kyoto

Saturday, July 20
This was the day all four of us traveled to Kyoto. This is the train we took, the Shinkansen Hikari RailStar. Of the three types of Shinkansen (so-called "bullet" trains) - Nozomi, Hikari, and Kodama - the Hikari is the mid-range one. In its typical 550-mile trip from Fukuoka to Tokyo, the Hikari stops more often than the Nozomi, but less often than the Kodama. The Hikari's maximum speed during its trip is about 275 km/hour, or 172 mph. That seems very fast, 3 times faster than a car on a highway, and 11 times faster than a human running a 4-minute mile. Only 11 times faster than someone running? According to my calculations, yes, though I could be proven wrong. It certainly feels a lot faster than that. We traveled around 400 miles by train this day, going from Kumamoto to Fukuoka, then Fukuoka to Kyoto.