D2 - more travel

We woke up early at 5am, then given moving at 7am for some Family Mart breakfast and ate at the hotel. After thus we took a quick walk to the Namba Yasaka Jinja shrine to show the kids. It was about 0 degrees.

We packed up and made our way to the Namba Midosuji metro line around 8am. We got on the not too packed train at the end carriage and rode it to Umeda. Here we exchanged our one way pass for tickets to Kanzawa and also found out that all Thunderbird cars are reserved, so we got that organised. We ended up on the 10:42 Thunderbird, this gave us time to grab some snacks for the train. Leaving Osaka it was snowing!!

And it continued to snow all the way to Kyoto as well. Tsugura was well and truly covered with snow. Our supposed arrival of 12:03pm ended up being 12:20pm, luckily our 12:17 shinkansen to Kanazawa was still waiting for passengers, so we managed to make the transfer and get onto our train.

When we got to Kanazawa station it was busy. We were hoping to store the ski bags at the station to avoid taking them the 1.5km walk to our hotel only to return the next day. Here we hit a snag - no lockers big enough, luggage storage would not take that size and also didn't open until 10am, when our train to Nagano is 9am. The nice lady at tourist info suggested we try a taxi.

So we headed over to the taxi rank and asked. Now this was our first Japanese taxi ride, but I think we ended up with a dodgy one. He loaded the boot with out bags then placed our skis hanging over the top above the middle back seat. Then he had our 15 yr old daughter sit in the front beside him, not my husband, our son sat under the ski bags crouched down, with my husband either side. Not to bad, until he asked to twitter chat with my daughter after some small talk about her age, high school, pierced ears. Lucky it was a short trip. It was an interesting first taxi ride.

We arrived at the hotel around 2pm, and very gladly dropped the bags. We went for a walk in some light snow to Kanazawa castle grounds, which was very different from cherry blossoms season as it was covered in snow. We had a bit of an explore as the snow varied its level of falling from barely any to a fair bit, all within minutes.

We then headed over to Higashi Chaya district. Her the snow started falling with more intensity and the flakes got bigger. We grabbed a custard tayaki, then went back out into the biggest flakes we have ever seen. If was like walking around in a foam party.

We then headed back to the hotel, deciding to walk rather than catch bus. We stopped at the 7-11 for a warm drink as we were pretty frozen. This put us at the hotel just after 4pm. Then they tell us we have free drinks until 10pm. Pity we had just bought drinks.

At 5:30pm we found a close restaurant that looked good to eat at and it was right next door to the hotel. However Emporer's birthday meant it was shut. So we found a Saizeriya 500ms away. So we hit up old faithful for some cheap fast food.Baca selengkapnya