Our Golden Week trip

I owe you all a blog.  Sorry for the delay.  Christian's parents came for a 2-week visit, and I decided that 4 adults could handle the kids on a roadtrip  As they say, many hands make the load light.  Well, my kids are a load.  We were pooped after this trip.  But the in-laws were very helpful.  Thanks a million!

The first week of May is Golden Week.  It's a few days off for Japanese workers.  Japanese workers do not often use their personally allotted vacation time, so this is kind of forced vacation for everyone.

We decided to see the Japanese Alps.  The Winter Olympics were once held in Nagano, so that's the approximate area where we headed.

We took a train to Matsumoto and got in a rental car and headed toward Takayama.  Takayama is known as "little Kyoto."  It has a very old-world Japanese feel.  It was beautiful.

Cherry blossoms were in full bloom.

And here are the kids in I'm not sure what!!

There were lots of cute little stores in Takayama.  There was even a store of old WWII paraphernalia that was run by a nationalist guy (so kind of creepy, in my mind).  Christian and his dad spent a bunch of time there!

We then drove to Shirakawa-go, which is a small farming community with homes made of thatched roofs.  We (or rather, I, since I made the arrangements) stayed in a farmhouse for one night.  This was a little too close to camping for my tastes, but it was fun.  We slept on futons on the floor (with only a space heater).  Gracie slept in her pack n play.  And we had home cooked meals prepared by the proprietor.  It was really neat.  The only negative thing (and this was really negative) was that the walls, if they existed, were paper thin.  So my wake-up-at-the-crack-of-dawn kids were making me really paranoid.  I was so worried about waking up other guests.  Gracie ended up waking up at 5 am, so we went for a walk!

Here is our room.

Here is a view of the "Alps" from my 5 am walk with Gracie.  I tell you, it looks like you're in Switzerland!

Here is the proprietor and her mother.  This fire was in the "dining room."  We all smelled like we were sitting around a fire for hours.  Christian's mom had a sweater that still smelled like smoke even after dry cleaning it! Yikes.

And here's me in front of our farmhouse.

Our final night was in Kanazawa, which is on the Sea of Japan coast.  It was a nice, cozy town.  People there were incredibly friendly.  One of the sad things was that we got a letter upon arriving at our hotel.  The letter basically said, "please tell your friends to visit our city, and tell them there is nothing to worry about in terms of earthquake/radiation stuff."  Evidently, tourism is way down.  So sad.

I wanted to see the Sea of Japan, but the coastline wasn't too exciting.  There were farms and greenhouses right until you hit the coast.  This is prime real estate, people!  However, there is a big seawall on the right...probably for tsunami protection.  We were thinking that maybe people were too afraid of living right near the coast because of the crazy North Koreans???

While we were there, we saw a Japanese steel drum band.  Not something you'd see back in Milwaukee!

So we got to see a bit more of Japan.  Honestly, Tokyo is not that attractive whatsoever.  The rest of the country is just gorgeous.