Thanks guys
I appreciate the welcome from forum members.
The first time I came here I 'memorised' the Kanji for my station.
The first Kanji was too hard, so I memorised the easy ones ツ〜窶彡ツ静ャ. If I forgot, I just looked at my ticket again.
I got off the train, put my ticket in the machine, and went for a nice walk around. Then that afternoon, I returned to the station to buy a ticket for home.
I hadn't noticed there were two stations ending in ツ〜窶彡ツ静ャ. They were very far apart. The clue was travelling to a vast agricultural plain, when in fact I was living in a valley in the mountains.
I could speak a little Japanese at that time. The three words kore, sore, and are were all I had bothered to learn, but I could get just about anything I wanted using them. Oh, and I could bow too.
I learnt a lot about JR and Kintetsu that evening, and got home for only 3 times what it cost me to leave. I had planned for the possibility of getting lost, but still had almost all of the $1,000 emergency money I had taken with me for the visit to the shrine.
RK