I had a rough night of waking up between 8PM and 3AM, at which time I finally gave up to go get dressed and find a Konbini (very well knowing nothing actually opens in Japan until 10AM) for a quick bite to eat and cold drinks. Everyone else ended up waking up, so we all ventured out in the drizzly rain at around 4AM. The streets were still mainly void of people, we saw a decked out race car parked on the side of the road with the driver nearby, a very drunk gentleman stumbling down the sidewalk and a few bar hoppers still walking home from their night out (not looking as drunk). I made the conclusion that the bars around here must close at 4AM, since as we walked more and more of these super stylishly dressed, like bar workers, were roaming about and the streets already had numerous people before we made it back with our Konbini stash of food shortly before 5AM. Our Shinaknsen for Sapporo left early, but not this early, so it was time to get a bite to eat, repack and make our way to the station slowly. Our first Konbini trip was a success with soft boiled eggs, a bread something-or-another that was tasty and juice/cold waters to hold us over. Why is a soft boiled egg from the Konbini this fresh and delicious tasting? That's a mystery someone from the U.S. will sit astounded at all day long, only taken for granted here in Japan.
One smooth Shinkansen ride later, we were in Hakodate for our transfer to the Hokuto Express, that would take us the last 2 hours over to Sapporo. The Shinkansen extension to make it all the way there (through many mountains, might I add), is due to be completed in 2030. This complex network of trains and fast/efficient travel does not happen overnight! It was a pretty simple process of hopping off one train and over to the next, with a few Konbini and Eki Bento shops along the way, I decide to grab myself my first Eki Bento and we continued the long journey. Going at a more leisurely pace allowed for some photos to be taken 
from the windows and observation of more fields, but this time some of them had horses and cows scattered about. This is where we were, Hokkaido of the north where almost all of Japan's diary comes from. A little sad I wouldn't be able to partake in it all for my GI upset reasons, I made it a must for kiddo to drink some milk and eat some ice cream while we were visiting, a demand she had no problems complying with.
Sapporo Station, ah, another labyrinth of malls and mazes. And for the first time this trip, but no stranger to us realizing that .4 miles is way longer when you have luggage with you. Instead of doing the smart thing and hailing a taxi for a 900Y cost to the apartment, we decide to walk it. 16 minutes with 25LBS on your back through a busy mall (we were here on a Sunday, tripling the traffic load) and down back alleys wasn't the most fun we'd have, but it was necessary at this point.
Luckily the AirBNB apartment was ready to be checked into and I had very detailed instructions on the process that had nothing to do with interacting with people. A quick code to get into the building and a few turns of an old style lock to get into the mailbox for a very traditional looking key and we were in what would be "home" for the next 4 days. The two bedrooms, living room, separate wash room and toilet down the hallway with a small living room, kitchen and dining room table were more than sufficient for the three of us, I was happy to be grounded for a few days and just sit down for a little bit before trying to figure out the rest of our evening. However, the earth had a wake up call for us, not 5 minutes after we sit down on the couch we here "BWOOP BWOOP BWOOP----- BWOOP BWOOP BWOOP". Having been just 3 weeks out from watching Suzume, I knew this noise! It was your 5 second earthquake warning and earthquake it was! Being on the 8th floor of this complex, it was quiet the shake, so myself and Terra head under aforementioned table until it decides to calm down. Looking at the reports it turned out to be a low 5 on the Japanese scale, basically enough to notice, but not enough to pause trains or knock over the glass on your table. Anything higher and stuff would've definitely been falling over. It took as a very real reminder to talk to Terra about safety and being prepared for these things, as I normally try to be, but sitting through a real earthquake was something for the memory book. In the prior 5 weeks total I've been here, we only had one other very small one in Nikko back in 2010- at the time we weren't even positive that's what it was. An earthquake big enough to trigger a warning was new!
Falling into what I sensed would become a pattern, we didn't really have time for "real lunch" besides what we could find at the train station and it now being close to 5PM, it was time to go find dinner. We had to go back to the Station to pickup the rest of our reserved tickets at a machine anyway, so I was really hoping to hit up a small Ramen place on the way back- the station itself was not hard to navigate in comparison to other places (especially in the coming days, more on this later), however once back in the station and with tickets obtained, we started to look around and realized there was a few cute pop up shops (BT21 and the like) AND a Pokemon center in this area. It was a very large complex of several malls and it really wasn't clear where the center was, so it was a few back and forth, turn around and then turn again and we finally made it into the only 8F mall there meaning it had to be the right one (the first two stopped at 7F). I wasn't aware of a center here, but of course there was, this was our experience in 2018 as well, there turned out to be a center almost everywhere we stopped instead of just the one place I had mapped out. We took the opportunity to grab a few necessities such as IC card pass holders and a wallet, but refrained from "shopping" as these were bags that would have to be hand carried for the next 2 weeks while travelled across the country by train.
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