Matsushiro (Kaizu) Castle

Waaaay back in July, Shawn had a long-time friend travel to Tokyo to visit for a week.  We hit the usual sightseeing spots around Tokyo, but we also took time to get out of the city.  We took the Shinkansen to Nagano and spent a short 1.5 days touring the city and surrounding areas.

The weather in Nagano was much cooler than it was in Tokyo.  It made the sightseeing more enjoyable for all of us!

We didn’t spend much time in the “downtown” part of Nagano.  (I actually forgot to take pictures of the city – oops!)  We ended up taking a city bus to 3 different sites around Nagano…

Our first stop was Matsushiro Castle…

I would love to have a front door like this someday!

What a beautiful view…

Stay tuned…I still have more photos to share.

Something to Make You Smile…

Hello everyone!  We are still here!  I still have several photos to share from our trip to Nagano, but for now I will leave you with this…

Is anyone else feeling like this?  Just hold on!! 

I will post more photos when things settle down a little…

(Yes…we saw monkeys on the trip.)

Nature

This is definitely not Tokyo…

I just wanted to give you a little view of what we saw during our trip to Nagano.  More to come…

A View from the Shinkansen

At the end of July, we took a much needed trip out of the Tokyo heat to Nagano.  This was our first trip on the Shinkansen (bullet train).  The Shinkansen is a high speed train which can travel at speeds up to 188 mph, so it took less than 2 hours to get to Nagano.

The photos above and below show you how the board changes between Japanese and English…

A good portion of the trip to Nagano is actually spent traveling through the mountains.  The tracks go directly through the mountains and when they exit, the “tunnel boom” phenomenon can occur.  It’s nothing we noticed, but it might impact nearby residents.

All of these photos were taken while we were traveling on the train.  I know this isn’t a very good photo, but it made me laugh.  This doesn’t look like Japan…

Random things out the window…

Stay tuned…I still have several more photos to share of our sightseeing in Nagano.  Don’t worry, they are much more exciting than the photos from the train.