wake.eat.sleep

I have been dying to go to a proper onsen and ryokan. (I did get to try an onsen out in Hiroshima during this trip.) So as I was putting together the itinerary, I wanted to target a place that would be nice, without being overly tourist-y. Thus, I avoided Hakone / Atami. I have heard from locals during the trip, that it's quite nice too.

The risky part of this trip was the fact that since it was a little bit off the beaten path, it wouldn't quite have the same type of "support" infrastructure that a heavy tourist area might. In this case, instead of having a single shinkansen (bullet train) that would take me to a major station. I would have to take a local train for half the trip.

(The bottom ticket is from Tokyo Station to Takasaki Station. The top ticket is travel from Takasaki Station on a local train to Minakami Station.) It is possible to set up the trip yourself using one of the automated machines. Armed with my broken Japanese, I got a little bit of assistance from one of the JR workers, who threw the train times. I did partially threw her off when I kept saying "Minamikami" instead of "Minakami". (That's what I get for watching a show called Minami-ke for a while!)

In case you haven't realized it already, one of my favorite things to do on a shinkansen is to have an ekiben:

This was quite filling! Then once we arrived at Takasaki, we transferred to the smaller local train on its way to Minakami:

We were greeted by a good wall of snow and wind as soon as we got into the area:

Thankfully, I wasn't planning on leaving. Why leave when your room looks as relaxing as this?

I'll talk about onsens, and the food in the subsequent parts in this series.

See you then!