Day 9 - Trip Nikko - Wed Jul 3

 

Day 9 - Trip Nikko - Wed Jul 3

Driving

Japan has one of the best, most efficient and fastest train systems in the world. The bullet trains can move you around in no time. But what fun would that be? So I rented a car for a month. How hard could it be driving on the wrong side of the road in a country I don’t speak the language or even recognize the characters for. And not to make it too easy for myself I started my journey in Tokyo, one of the largest cities in the world.

Turns out Tokyo’s streets are really narrow, overrun with bikes and people constantly park on the side of the road, or what would be the side if the roads had shoulders. It’s pretty hard to erase 30+ years of programming to stay on the “other” side and intuitively knowing the space on the left side of the vehicle. Even some of the instruments are reversed. I’m hoping the locals realize when I turn on my windshield wipers I’m letting them know I’m making a left turn. And just because there isn't a white dotted line on your right, or even no line at all, doesn't mean you won't be met with oncoming traffic if you move over too far.

I was brought up with values like, if it's not right it is wrong. Nuff said. 

At any rate we managed to escape from Tokyo and visited a few cool places on the way to Nikko.

Oya History Museum

It’s built inside a massive former stone quarry, with underground caverns covering over 20,000 square meters — larger than Tokyo Dome. Movies like Rurouni Kenshin were filmed there.

Oya-ji Park - Giant Buddha

Dinner at Yakiniku Restaurant

Went for Japanese BBQ. We had wagyu beef, pork belly, steak and pig ear. We didn't tell the kids about the last one till after. They weren’t impressed. We didn’t actually mean to order pig ear but the menu was in Japanese and Google translate sometimes just gives you the phonetic translations for the Japanese word which doesn’t help.

Our Nikko Hotel