It was a much better sleep in this hotel. I woke up about 6.00, and next thing I knew it was 7.30. So I was feeling quite refreshed. I had a shower and we went downstairs for breakfast, which was included in the room charge.
Breakfast wasn’t anything fantastic, but there was a range of food, including salad, scrambled egg (but really not appetising), bacon (in lots of fat), mini sausages, some noodles…. of course, rice and miso soup. And I also had some bread (Kaoru had nutto).
After breakfast we returned to our room and had about 30 minutes to kill, before heading to the station, and catching the train to Ashikaga. Our plan originally was to go to the Ashikaga Flower Park, and see the evening illumination of the wisteria. The advertising photos looked amazing! But unfortunately they bloomed early this year, and had already finished. So we gave that a miss. Instead from Ashikaga station we walked to the Ashikaga Gakko – Japan’s oldest standing academic building.
It was quite a warm day, especially in the sun. But we had a good walk around and enjoyed the experience. There were some amazing models of the place too.
We had a walk around Ashikaga, and eventually ended up at the shrine. There were 250 stairs to get to the top, but it was a beautiful view once we got there!
They were filming something at the top, so we were worried that we couldn’t get up the last 30 steps. Luckily after a 5 minute wait they were on a hold and we were able to go up.
There were also varied colour tori gates, with different “good luck” meanings, so going back down we took the scenic path to go through them all. I had only ever seen tori gates in red before now.
We started walking back to the station, but decided to stop for lunch at a small restaurant. I had prawn croquettes and Kaoru had some fish. We both had a set meal, so it came with rice and miso soup.
We only had a couple of minutes to wait for the train, so timed it well – especially as the train only runs every hour! But eventually we got back to Tochigi station. Then we walked to our next destination – the new ginger museum! Kaoru had found photos of this place, and whilst it looked quite wrong, we still had to go to see it with our own eyes…
We had 3sies there, which included a ginger croquette, and an apple pie, plus ginger beer. It was a nice place to visit, but very pink!
It had started to spit when we got there, and also was cooling down. It wasn’t really raining as we left, but we saw a bus stop across the road, and the bus (which runs hourly) was coming in 1 minute, so we took that as a sign, and paid the 200 yen each to return to the station in comfort rather than walk. On our way to our room we stopped at a shop next to the hotel to have a look inside. A lady came in and asked me where I was from. She had seen us on the train from Ashikaga (who would have thought Kaoru and I would stand out :)). So we had a little chat to her. She had lived in Canada some years ago, but most of her talking was with Kaoru in Japanese.
We returned to our room for a lie down, which was refreshing. I dealt with some work things for a bit, and then we wandered out for dinner. I had found a restaurant that did fried food on skewers, that was quite close. We walked in, and unfortunately there was a smoker inside, so it was quite smelly. He didn’t smoke for a while which was good (especially as there were 2 kids aged ~4yo in their group) but he did start another one as we had finished and were wondering whether to order more or not. So we paid the bill and left for 7-11, to get an ice cream sandwich, some noodles, sake….the usual! We took it back to our room and watched some TV before going to bed.