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!

Fushimi Inari-taisha

Oh Fushimi Inari!!  I had really high expectations for going here.  They were surpassed a thousand times over!  We got up really early and after walking a while we decided to get a taxi to take us there.  The taxi driver gave Darin some directions (in Japanese) on where to go.  I thought he was pointing a different direction but, I trusted Darin (since he DOES speak Japanese after all), and we went right to it!  We stopped for a quick breakfast (a yummy bread with mayo and onions—they put a lot of mayo on things and I LOVED it!  So good!).

After breakfast we started our hike up the mountain.  There was NO ONE there!  It was amazing!  I had read that the hike was 2 hours up and a little less coming back.  I asked Darin how much he wanted to do (because I also read that most people just go for the first part), and he said he wanted to do the WHOLE thing!  We did and it was AWESOME!  SO SO SO pretty!  I wish that pictures could capture the awesomeness! 

Another fun thing was while we were on the hike, nearly to the top we ran into two Americans (by itself was AWESOME because we had only seen about 3 American to this point in our trip).  They asked if we were from Utah, and I was shocked and asked how they knew!  They then told me that Darin was wearing a Utes shirt. Ha!  They said they were from Texas, and asked if we were Mormon because they were too!  So random!  I LOVED it!  Only 6 people on the top of this whole mountain and 4 of us were American Mormons!

After we made it to the top, we started back down the mountain and slowly there were groups of people coming up.  The groups started getting bigger and bigger.  By the time we made it to the bottom it was PACKED!  I was so glad that we got up early!  There is NO WAY we could have gotten our amazing pictures if we had waited even an hour to go!  So fun!

This picture was taken at the very start of our journey.  You can see the sun is still  coming up.  When we walked out, this walk way was PACKED!  I was SO SO glad we got up early!!

I forgot to charge our camera and the camera  battery died part way through, and we hardly took any pictures of the two of us with the nice camera, but I was sure glad we had Darin's phone with us too!