April 13 - off the ship and into Tokyo

We had a nice breakfast in the dining room where we saw Peter and Carol one last time and said goodbye to other friends made on board.  Unfortunately one of the 4 couples with us was one we'd eaten with before and she is rather a grumpy snob.  She complained to the waiter that one of her two poached eggs on English muffins was "stone cold and unpalatable".  I had to wonder if perhaps it had gone cold while
she was eating the first one, but didn't say anything.  She had also dumped HP sauce (like our Heinz 57 steak sauce) all over it all so I had to wonder at her taste to begin with 😉.  Ah well, takes all kinds and fortunately she was in the small minority of complainers.

We were called to get off the ship right on time at 9:40 and walked right off to our bags and out to the taxi stand.  As suggested by the concierge at our hotel, the Grand Nikko Tokyo Daiba, we took a taxi to the Yokohama City Air Terminal, which is a bus terminal despite its name.  From there we bought tickets on the highway bus to Odaiba leaving in an hour which has a drop off at the door of the hotel.  Easy breezy.  The check in clerk said that even though check in technically is 3:00 pm (it was noon) our room was ready so we could go on up, but don't tell anyone (wink).  They normally have a charge for early check in.  The room isn't very big, but it has free WiFi and they provide a free smart phone that has unlimited WiFi and unlimited local and international calling! We are free to bring it with us when we go out! Unbelievable, especially since we are paying about $150 a night for this room - a deal through booking.com. 

We booked a half day tour tomorrow with the concierge, reserved 2 seats on the bus to the airport on Monday and headed out to explore.  There is a multistory shopping center right across the street with lots of restaurants so we ate at a noodle shop.  There is a train station (Odaiba) right in front of the hotel so we went to the location of our tour meeting place so we could find it tomorrow morning.  Of course we got on the train in the wrong direction and had to get off and turned around, so it's good we did a dry run.  We wandered a bit more then came back for a rest before having a good dinner at a different place in the shopping center.  Love that the restaurants have pictures of everything on the menu since even the English translations aren't that informative.  The hotel has many restaurants also,  but looking at the menus online, the average price for dinner is nearly $100 per person, so we'll give them a miss.