My Birthday: Kanzanji Ropeway

On my birthday Jonathan and I first went to Ichino because I wanted to eat ramen there. I wasn't very hungry yet when we got there so we visited some stores first.

We spent some time in Village Vanguard. It's such a fun store! They sell a lot of very random stuff and have a good selection of Sailor Moon merchandise.

I made Jonathan try on Barbie glasses, haha.

For lunch I got the golden miso ramen, my favorite! :)

Then we drove to the Kanzanji ropeway. We had tried going to just the observatory on the top two weeks before but there wasn't any parking up there and it was too late to drive to the other side. The week before we were going to bike there but ended up not going that far.

The lower ropeway station is connected to the Pal Pal amusement park but you don't have to pay the park admission to take the ropeway. But we did have to park in the Pal Pal parking lot which was 800 yen. The price for an adult ropeway ticket is 820 for round trip. You can also get it combined with admission to the music box museum at the top for an extra fee but we didn't do that.

It was a very nice day and Pal Pal was very lively. It didn't seem depressing like the last time I had seen it.

The ropeway takes four minutes to go across lake Hamana. It looked like it was going to be kind of scary, but it wasn't once we were on it. 

 

At the top we went up to the roof of the museum and visited the observatory, which is free.

The view was very pretty, but it was sooooo windy! And cold!

I got that tofu sheep plushie from Jonathan for my birthday. :)

 
The bells at the top play a song on the hour, but we arrived a little too late. But we were able to hear it later while we were hiking in the woods.

 
There are some trails that lead down to the lake.

As we headed back up to the ropeway, Jonathan suddenly yelled. He almost stepped on a big snake!

In the parking lot Jonathan noticed that the car next to mine had a big Rilakkuma in the backseat.

On the way back to Jonathan's apartment I wore my new sunglasses. I saw them at Village Vanguard earlier in the day and Jonathan got them for me.

I don't remember what we ate for dinner (maybe a grocery store bento?) but we did have donuts from Mister Donut for dessert.

We did some cherry blossom poppers. They didn't have a whole lot of confetti in them so they weren't as cool as I expected, but they were still pretty.

The Kanzanji ropeway was nicer than I expected. It was a great way to spend my birthday and one of my last weekends in Japan.