A friend of me wanted to go for some summer vacation. I hadn’t any plans but insisted that it must be up North to flee the scorching heat of Tokyo. I hadn’t any plans made some potential plans to go to Towadako, so that’s where we went. We met up a few weeks ago to plan everything, found a very nice ryokan in Kazuno (all the places on the lake itself were either extremely expensive or had bad evaluations).
A month before we bought the train tickets, which turned out to be more complicated than we thought. Although we took an early morning train out of Tokyo on a Friday morning when we wanted to buy the tickets, there were no rear row seats available anymore and overall the train was already pretty packed. But she managed to get some reasonable seats in the second but last row.
However this morning we had to wait for 1,5 h for the train. Somehow there was a delay in rail works between Omiya and Sendai so no trains of the Tohoku Shinkansen could leave Tokyo station.
So although I got up at 4:30 we were only at around 12:00 in Hachinohe.
Towadako is pretty hard to reach by public transport and probably impossible with a bicycle in tow, so we rented a car (my first time driving in Japan after converting my driving license again back in 2022… I had driven here sometimes between 2015 and 2017 but not since) but luckily driving is slow and automatic cars are easy to drive.
As a typical Japanese my friend found a perfect spot for a light lunch in an old farmhouse.
Our original plan was to do some hiking along the famous Oirase stream… but when we got to the upper parking lot we learned that both the road and the hiking trail were closed since a few days due to damage by too much rain. So we did a mini walk around that information center …
.. and then continued by car onwards to our ryokan. Which was actually good timing as we arrived around 17:00 and had all the time to enjoy the rotenburo while gazing out into the big Japanese garden with an even bigger pond…
… before our rich dinner in the room.
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