As if Thanksgiving didn’t pack enough excitement for the Sen Guesthouse gang, two days later the four of us packed into a rental car and hit the road!
And boy, did we put some miles between us and Matsuyama!
In the first two days alone we were either on a ferry or in a car for twelve hours, Kelley and I secured the backseat (mostly because we have no international drivers’ licenses…) and Matt and Nori shored up the front seats, doing ALL the driving and navigating….thanks guys!
Before I continue a small geography lesson might be in order.
On the map below, the city where Sen is, Matsuyama isn’t actually labeled, but it’s on the west side of Shikoku, the island where Kochi is to the bottom and slightly left on the map.
From Matsuyama, we took a ferry across the sea to the southern-most large island in Japan, called Kyushu.
The ferry took us to the town of Beppu, which is known for ONSEN! All four of us love Japanese hot spring baths of course.
And that love inspired us to go to two different baths in the span of our 16 hours in the town of Beppu – the one above, a historically preserved onsen from the early 20th century called Takegawara. The next morning we tried out one of the famous sand baths that are found only in Beppu.
What you see above is actually a huge sandpit that is filled with hot spring water to heat the sand, then drained. Four women with rakes spend the entire day burying customers in the hot sand for fifteen-minute increments.
I know. It sounds silly, but honestly it’s delicious. The weight of the sand on your body, and how your head gets propped up by warm sand so you can see the sea out over the sandpit.
To be quite honest, we all fell in love with Beppu and wished we had more time to explore. The whole town had plumes of steam billowing up to the heavens from everywhere, there is just SO much hot steaming water below the city’s surface!
But move on, we did! We covered the entire length of Kyushu to Kagoshima in the south on Sunday, the second day of our trip. We found a delicious little rest area (nothing like their American counterpart) where we all had a different kind of soul-filling Japanese meal. Above you’ll see that Matt was a little jealous that Nori got her meal first!
Because we got so many pictures (all thanks to Kelley!), I’m going to break up this trip into multiple postings and keep you all on pins and needles about where our final road-trip destination was. I promise it’ll be worth the wait!
Yeah! You’re back; now I got to look at all the wonderful pictures. Glad the vacation was wonderful and you’re sharing it w us!