An interesting fact about Nagatoro is that the whole town is designated as a national park!
On the second day we went to Nagatoro it was very sunny and a great day to go up the ropeway! The only downfall was that hiking up the steep mountain on the top was so hot! Beware, I have a bazillion pics of the mountain and they are not the same! Instead of spending an hour going through them I just posted them all. Sorry for the inconvenience!
At the top of the mountain you can see out and the view is not captured properly in my photos. The mountains went on forever in the distance with many ridges but in my pictures they look covered in clouds. It wasn't like that in real life, it was all very green and they went back even further then the picture shows! At the top of Hodosan there is a small deer zoo that we didn't go to as we have seen deer in the wild in Canada. There was a small temple at the top too and many look out points. People could also hike up and down the mountain and not take the gondola but we didn't. It was so hot that day that you would have suffered heat exhaustion if you attempted to hike the mountain. It is an hour to 1.5 hour hike one direction.
After we hiked we needed to cool off so we went to a famous shaved ice shop. The ice as really soft and the flavouring was in the natural tasting side, nothing sickly sweet like the blue raspberry or sour cherry slushies we have. We tried the ichigo (strawberry), lemon-honey, and mikan (orange) flavour. My favourite was the lemon-honey and strawberry, Greg's was the lemon, Aiden only liked strawberry and Miki liked the orange. The shaved ice comes in mountains and the flavour comes in a small bowl to the side and you pour it on the mountain of ice yourself.
That night we went with Miki and her parents to kaiten zushi. It is the type of sushi establishment that has a conveyor belt with the different plates of sushi on them and if you see what you like, you pick it up as it comes by. The conveyor belt weaves around the whole building on the side of each of the booths. You can also order the sushi from a touch screen and it will be delivered to your table by a small version of the shinkensen (that is the fastest train in the world, and it is found right here in Japan!) You pay by the plate, and each plate has two pieces of sushi. There are also deserts and juice boxes too. In the more fancy places, the plate colour determines the price, however in this restaurant it is geared towards the budget friendly family and every plate was only one dollar! It's hard to believe as mine and Aiden's favourite tamago (egg) sushi is $3.50 for 2 pieces and here it is only a buck! There was less higher cut sushi then a more up scale kaiten zushi place, but we really enjoyed it! Aiden had the most plates surprisingly! I think it was his favourite restaurant in Japan so far!
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