Trip to Hakone

Ayako and I took a day trip to Hakone on Tuesday. It was both a good trip and a bad trip all rolled into one. We'll start with the good news.

Hakone is halway between Hamamatsu and Tokyo. It's up in the mountains and is famous for its onsens (hot springs). It was very beautiful to drive along the winding roads in the misty mountains:
There are three small towns in the area that have many onsen hotels. In one of them, we walked around and looked at the many souvenirs shops. The area is famous for its wood carving. We bought some souvenirs including some super soft mochi that's a bit sweet (called Yumochi). I had tried it before when a student brought some back from one of her trips, so I was happy to try it again. We enjoyed soba for lunch in a small restaurant looking out over a river:

After this, we decided that instead of going to a traditional onsen bath, we would try an amusement-style onsen with many interesting baths. It was full of families and quite the interesting experience. Some of the baths we tried going into were: green tea, sake, coffe, and red wine. They also had a Dead Sea bath with lots of salt so you could float quite easily. They also had many water slides as well.

The most interesting bath was a foot bath that contained Doctor fish. These are small fish that come up and eat the dead skin on your feet while leaving the alive skin. It doesn't hurt at all and tickles a little (or a lot in Ayako's case):
After the crazy baths, we went north to a town called Gotemba. They have a large outlet mall (Premium Outlets) there. I've been to one of these malls outside of New York before. There are 8 of them in Japan and the set up and architecture closely resembled the one in New York. I didn't buy anything but Ayako enjoying buying a few things.

Well the good part was all about our trip there. The bad part was about getting there and back again. On Tuesday morning (the day we left) there was a large typhoon the was supposed to come. They sometimes come close to us and sometimes just miss us completely. We decided to risk a bit of rain and go there. Unfortunatley, at 5:00 am that day there was the largest earthquake I've felt yet (6.5 magnitude). Luckily everything calmed down by 7:00 am, so we decided to head off on our trip.

Unfortunatley, we didn't know that the earthquake a taken a large chunk out of the toll highway going to Tokyo. We weren't going to use that road but a non-toll road. Due to the damage though, the toll highway was closed (and still is) in our area and so all of the traffic came down to the road we were using. This turned a 4-hour drive into a 6-hour drive. It was nice to be relaxing in the baths after such a long drive.

We finished quite late in Hakone and decided to rest in the car for awhile. We thought that by leaving later (about midnight) we could drive back home during the night and the roads wouldn't be too busy. Again, we guessed wrong. This time it took 8 hours to drive back home. The we a number of times when I was sitting on the highway with the car turned off for 20-minutes, only to start moving and get up to 60 km/h for a few minutes and then be sitting still again for 20 minutes. None of the traffic's movement seemed to make any sense. Finally, I risked getting lost and turned off the highway and started driving along small country roads to get home. Luckily I didn't get lost, but I was mighty tired after being in the worst traffic jam of my life.