Tuesday, October 09, 2018

Country roads from Yonaga to Hiroshima

Following the usual breakfast we said good bye to our friends for them to carry on their own way home to Osaka and we will travel to Hiroshima using all the country roads and stay away from the Expressways.

Our route took us up in to the mountains and plenty of places where to put on your snow tyre chains and also some locations for skiing as there were signs directing you there. we p[assed lots of small villages nestling in the bottom of valleys and when you started to reach a bigger town you also had factories one side of the valley and houses the other side.
The traffic was almost nothing and you cannot believe you are in a very busy country of 127,103,366 people, they actually have a website updating all the time with the current headcount, quite unique really as we could not do this in the UK as nobody knows how many people are there. And so the journey was very easy indeed
We stopped by a country 7-11 for some sandwiches and they also have good loos, worth remembering, and then sat outside to east them and then off again on the open roads through more mountains and of course lots of forests. The leaves on these trees must be something to behold at certain times of year. We finally arrived in the outskirts of Hiroshima which is quite a bustling city which also has a tram network which we may try out tomorrow

We arrived at the Grand Prince Hotel in Hiroshima which is out of town and on a peninsular with really great views and will take some photos tomorrow. The room is very comfortable and so after a quick rest and a shower and a glass of Chardonnay , courtesy of Costco,we headed down stairs to the buffet only it was closed.  Oh well lets try the Boston Steak and Lobster Restaurant on the 21 st floor and we arrived and were shown to a waiting room for five minutes, so perhaps they were busy but no I think they were waking up the chef and his staff as there were only about 8 people in the restaurant which is supposed to seat 130. We ordered two glasses of Sancerre and it tasted awful and so we sent it back and the waiter said perhaps we would like to order something else but disappeared off the scene like a scalded rabbit with his tail on fire. We never did get another glass of wine even after they delivered a new wine list and then never came to take an order. Noel ordered a steak which was rather small with some French fries and Jennifer a chicken breast with mashed potato,again rather small so will be out tomorrow for dinner.
We had made a few phone calls to family prior to leaving for dinner and its always good to catch up and find out what is happening. Michael is busy decorating the hallway and initially when he answered the phone wearing a mask we wondered who he was operating on, Ha.
And then back to the room to write the blog and sort out some photos.

NB- The video above wont work but cannot seem to delete the ICON