There's not much to see or do in Morioka, but that was part of the point. We both needed a break from big city life for a bit, and this relatively small city of 140,000 people looked like a good place for it.
We took the Shinkansen from Kyoto to Tokyo, and Tokyo to Morioka. This was the first time either of us had ridden on one, and we were duly impressed. With our Japan Rail Passes and a copy of the Shinkansen schedule in English we were able to easily reserve seats on specific trains, and alter our itinerary whenever we felt like it. As promised by our Osaka friends, the Shinkansen regular class seats were the equivalent of airline coach with much much more leg room. The trains were punctual, efficient, and the food carts that were rolled by featured (and I know saying this challenges all credibility, but here goes) *edible train food*.
Anyways, we got to Morioka in the late afternoon. Mom looked around a bit; I crashed almost immediately intending to get up the next morning and have a good look around.
About 3:30 am, someone apparently changed the setting on their massage chair from "Lower back" to "Entire city and surrounding suburbs". Having lived in California for the last 28 years, I thought "How nice, a little bit of home in a foreign country," and went back to sleep.
My mother was not so sanguine, and while she thoughtfully waited until our agreed waking time (8 am) to tell me, she was quite clear that she was getting the heck out of northern Japan before the sun set again.
So we got. On the way down we stopped at Ichinoseki for a trip out to the Geibikei Gorge. That was a pleasant outing, and a nice way to break up the trip down to Tokyo.
(As a side note, the pleasant rocking motion that woke me up in Morioka, that my mom and I thought was probably a 3.0 or 4.0, turned out to be a 7.1 off the coast of Hokkaido. The final count appears to be just 8 injuries and a 4 inch tsunami wave, thankfully)
