It's Thursday. That means we're off to Takayama and Furukawa. But before we go, we have breakfast with the group. From left to right - Muni (Toshie's husband), Toshie, Margie, Carolyn, Lorayne, Barsha, Sandra, Marico, Granny.
The trip to Takayama is our first venture on a bullet train. These are super-fast, super-nice trains. If you must go by train this is the way to go. The stops are usually few and VERY "brief". Passengers queue up to get on and queue up to get off. Here's our train to Takayama and the group queued for boarding.
Of course the first order of business upon reaching Takayama is LUNCH! We walked what seemed like quite a distance (it probably wasn't) to a soba noodle restaurant. Here Granny had "tempura soba", i.e. hot soba noodles with some tempura either on the side or in the bowl. The same dish we had when we first arrived in Monbetsu.
The scheduled activity after lunch was a tour of the Yoshijima house. This is a beautiful house with some wonderful art. In what seems to be traiditional Japanese fashion, the rooms have little or no furniture. They have tatami mat flooring and often a little alcove or other feature. The places are beautiful in their simplicity.
Granny's favorite piece of art in the house was the one on the left. Simple but beautiful.
After the Yoshijima house tour, we were on our own for a short time before we were to meet at the train station for our van trip to Furukawa. Furukawa will be our home base for the next 2 days.
It's hard to take pictures from a fast moving train. However, here are a few attempts. We saw a lot of rice paddies, some very nice "mountain" streams and, as we got a little farther north, we began to see a few cherry trees that were still in bloom. We were fortunate that we had been to the north earlier and seen the cherry blossoms in full bloom.
