Last Japan Post--The Video

I can't believe we have already been back a month.

We had such a wonderful time!  

I made this video with a few of the highlights from our trip.

Enjoy!

Nabana No Sato Part 2

Alright! Last Japan Post!

  Part 2!  Possibly my favorite part of Japan!  The whole time we were in Japan (and even before when we were planning our trip), Darin kept teasing me that we needed to go to an Onsen (public bath usually in a hot spring).  I adamantly told him NO!

Well, as we were wandering Nabana No Sato, we found an ONSEN for FEET ONLY!  I was on board for that!  It is a natural hotspring and the water was straight out of the ground from the depth of 1000 meters. It felt SOOOO good!!  Darin thought that it was too hot.  I thought it was PERFECT!  I could go for some of that right now!

After the Onsen, we went to a BEAUTIFUL restaurant!  It had HUGE glass windows that looked out into the gardens.  I had a tuna sashimi bowl that looked BEAUTIFUL, mom had calamari, and Darin had eel and dobinmushi (I wished that I had ordered that—it was delicious!)

As it started getting dark, we headed to the tunnel of light.  It did not disappoint! I LOVED it!  They also had a light show.  This year’s show was Heidi.  That was really cute too! It was a WONDERFUL day filled with so many wonderful bonus surprises!

This was our last night in Japan!  

The PERFECT ending!!

Thanks again mom and dad for EVERYTHING!

We had a great time and look forward to seeing you in 7 months!!

Nabano No Sato Part 1

YEARS ago I discovered “Winter Illuminations” and put it on my “dream bucket list” (A list of things I would LOVE to do, but can’t even put them on my real bucket list because it seems so far-fetched).  When Darin’s parents got their call to Japan and we started making plans to go visit, I thought it would be AMAZING to go see this tunnel of lights, but I wasn’t really sure if it was feasible or even relatively close to where we would be visiting.

Well, as we made our plans, we discovered that it was only about 40 minutes away!!  But, the bummer was they only did the tunnel December to February, and our plans were for March/April. 

It may not seem like a tender mercy to anyone but me, but for the FIRST year, they extended the dates another two months!!!  We got it all worked out and we got to go!!

We got there really early, and I had NO IDEA how awesome it really was!  They had AMAZING gardens and tulips EVERYWHERE!  It really was so beautiful! 

They had a little ride that took us pretty high for some nice views from above. 

My only sadness from this is that NONE of these pictures do ANY justice to how amazing it really was!

Beautiful!