May 2022
One of the 3 things in this title were meant to happen, and the other 2 were accidental little gems we found instead of what we had planned.
So you know the famous park in Ibaraki Japan with the Baby Blue Eye flower fields and the ocean?
Hitachi Seaside Park. This one.
(Image from google and link
here)
Well, I finally had a day where me and husband were both off and we could borrow his parents car. We left the house at 9:30, picked up the car and hit the road.
And then, we hit the worst traffic jam I can remember ever being in in my LIFE. It was the first official day of Golden Week, which meant the day everyone leaves to travel. We learned a lesson that day. LEAVE at like 6am if you must travel the first day of Golden Week out of Tokyo by car. Anyway, I had my camera and music and each other, and a whole day ahead of us, so we made the best of it.
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| What Sonic the Hedgehog level is this?? |
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| Sooooo many rice fields |
So after 8 hours (!!!!!!!!!!) (supposed to be about a 3 hour drive...) We finally made it!!!!
...just kidding. This is just a small patch of nemophilia in a parking lot about 5 minutes away from the park because WE DIDN'T MAKE IT IN TIME. That's right, we left at 9:30 am and we arrived at the line for the parking lot an hour before their 5 o'clock
closing time, and we made it to the ticket area by 4:50. So no flowers for us this year
.........
Plan B: (which we were considering might happen as we slowly were realizing we might not actually make it by the 5 o'clock closing time) was to drive to the end of that same road and see some ocean, so we did.
Next up was to head to a park he'd found online! Literally, all the parks, aquariums, and zoos closed at 5 except for this park. Another thing I wanted to do was to find the grocery store called Kasumi, which is like everywhere in Ibaraki (at least in my experience) and get their yaki imo because Ibaraki grows satsuma imo sweet potatoes and they're AMAZING. So, I checked google maps and found something very strange and interesting sounding nearby...Hoshiimo Jinja!!!! Hoshi imo is dried sweet potato (not AS good as yaki imo but same potato made it). It was 5 minutes from our current location, so we went. I found the god and place meant for me XD It's a newly built shrine (4 years ago, so 2018? The first year of Reiwa in the Japanese calendar) literally dedicated to hoshi imo, A shrine for dried sweet potato!!!
And they had an imo bike you could pose with XD
And there was a hoshiimo vending machine, and it was delicious, perfect texture (and also what's hanging out of my mouth in the above photos)
After that, we headed to Chinami Park. Actually I'm trying to google it now but it looks like its all like one big park with small bits all possibly even connecting to Kairakuen which is the only one of the 3 famous gardens of Japan I haven't been to yet in Mito! We didn't go very far, just wandered a bit of Senba lake, but that 15 minutes was all we needed. We found 2 black swans!! Neither of us had ever seen a real one before, and they came close when we called to them!
After that, we'd decided we’d had our fill of adventure for the day, and headed back to Tokyo (which took only about 3 hours, by the way)
The moral of this story is, as long as you are open minded and positive, you can find adventure everywhere even when your plans fail! I have many memories and so does my husband of traveling when things go wrong, and everyone gets stressed and ends up unhappy, and I'm so glad that we aren't that way. I'm always positive and see the best in everything, and he is oppositely negative and assumes the worst, but we are both very chill, go-with-the-flow people and it balances out. He keeps me realistic, but I show him the light. He's happy when I am happy, and I'm always looking at the bright side, so together, we are perfect traveling partners <3
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