Wednesday 15th April 2014- Toyama is a quiet place

We left the Hotel in Takayama after the free breakfast? Of cold omelette and sausages and noodles and perhaps fried bamboo shoot with asparagus and the only thing that was warm were the French fries, wow what a breakfast. Jennifer had toast and jam.

We stayed of the Expressways as we were planning a trip over the mountains on the smaller roads only to find that several of them were closed either due to snow or perhaps landslides, who knows but anyway we had to turn round on two occasions and head back to the main roads.

It was a little misty this morning what with the warm midday temperature of 22 C and down to 2 Degrees Cent at night which left and mist over the hills many of which were covered in snow.

The traffic was extremely light on all the roads we went on and todays journey was only going to be around 65 miles from Takayama if going direct but as mentioned we could not go through the foothills.we also saw a large number of very large houses which you don't

 normally see.

We stopped for lunch of sandwiches which we had purchase d earlier (just in case we could not get anything sensible on the roads) and had our food under the blossoming cherry trees which was nice. We followed the main road in to Toyama and expected tons of traffic but no, we found the Hotel very easily and checked in then went for a walk to the station to find out about local trains. Again we were bemused by the lack of people, the small restaurants being closed!! Not like Tokyo or Kyoto where most places stay open all the hours that are available to make money.

We are planning a train ride down the coast tomorrow as against driving where we are both engaged in driving and navigating and hope the weather will continue to stay fine. We walked back down alongside the river with some cherry blossom still out but some trees had passed their prime, a little bit like the author of this blog.

We fancied Tempura tonight (English fried fish) and the Hotel gave us an address after we had tried two nearby restaurants which looked terribly expensive but did not have any menus with photos to enable us to understand what we are ordering. We found this little place and when we said Tempura in several different ways it became clear that they did not do Tempura but could make some great Yakitori, meat's on a stick.

So two large beers later and an attempt by the chef to make Tempura and some yakitori together with a long discussion on Manchester United and Chelsea, JT, Lamp’s, Oscar etc we enjoyed our evening.