Japan Trip Day 4: Shin-Takaoka, Takaoka

After 2 days in Disney Resort, as expected we could not stick into early morning plan to change city. We only left from the hotel at 813am and the crowd for the train was madness. It was lucky for us that we were able to board the second train. Otherwise I did not want to think how long we had to wait until the morning peak hour was over. Thank God and at the same time it is a lesson to consider the mad Tokyo peak hours when the holiday includes transferring.

Today is the final straw that makes me really fed up and angry with my sister. Photo-taking aside, she has been extremely useless and not helpful. For example, instead of searching or asking where to exchange for JR pass, she simply joined a queue at a counter simply because there were a lot of foreigners queueing there. That counter turned out to be for making seat reservations. After getting our JR pass, the earliest available reserved seat was for past 1pm train and if we took that, we had no time to visit the Doraemon park. So we decided to take the non-reserved train at 1032am.

Again this is another lesson about shinkansen seat reservation. During my trip with a friend in 2015, we took Shinkansen towards Osaka for a few times and never once we had to reserve seats. We always could get seats and the shinkansens were never so crowded. Today was an eye opener, the queues for the non-reserved cabins were so long. It was lucky that we still could enter and allowed to stand inside the cabin. Gosh.. I was prepared to stand for the whole 2 hours+ journey but thank God people were alighting along the way and after about an hour I managed to get a seat.

I was waiting close to departure time before deciding to buy a shumai bento and by the time I went there, the last box was bought by the person in front of me. Sianz.. I decided to go to the nearest kombini and discovered about NewDays x Conan collaboration. I bought a few of the Conan bread but I did not see any of the merchandises.

One thing that stood out the most during the whole shinkansen journey was Karuizawa. It was the only place already covered with thick snow and as we were passing by, everyone in the train was oooh-ing and wow-ing. That added up another irritation for me as I initially suggested Karuizawa but my sister wanted Nagano over a ski resort that she found in a blog.

It was drizzling when we reached Shin-Takaoka. We were lucky that we were able to find available large lockers for our luggages although it was a freaking hard work to lift up the luggage to the higher locker. Weather forecast was rainy for the whole day and lucky it was only drizzling when we were there. We did not need to open umbrella. Now Doraemon park (or Otogi no Mori Park) is something my sister wanted and again she literally did NOTHING to find a way to go there. The park is about 15 minutes walk from Shin-Takaoka stations and super disappointing. The Doraemon section is just the 6 statues and everything that is shown in the internet is really what the park has to offer. We came at somewhat a bad timing too. The foliage was barren during this pre-winter and the sky was dark because of the rain. Everything looked so gloomy unlike those summer or snow pictures of the park in the internet. It stopped drizzling when we were taking pictures and then it started to drizzle again as we walked back to the station. That was another blessings because at least I did not have to worry about my camera getting wet.

The park is that huge but the Doraemon is just a small section that I highlighted in red

If only I can be as joyful as Nobita and Doraemon. Alas my mood today is as gloomy as the sky and the dying trees.
This is all the Doraemon section in the park.

We had to take JR Johanna train from Shin-Takaoka to Takaoka station. It was quite awkward as I felt that people were not used to see tourists and there were some weird looks. After dropping our luggages in the room, we went to have dinner first. We stay at Takaoka Manten Ekimae Hotel and Doraemon no Sampo Machi is just in front of the hotel. As the sun was already setting, we just wanted to take quick photos before dinner. I did not take photos of the statues and I think I can do it on the morning before leaving Takaoka for Nagano. I completely snapped this time and gave up about good photos with my sister.  I told her to just take my photo with the statues once and then go for dinner. Checking and repeating the photos to keep getting shit photos were just driving me crazy! Haiz.

After exploring the area around station to find the waiting room for our meeting point with the tour guide tomorrow, we realised a lot of shops were not open. We had dinner at one pasta restaurant. After a quick grocery shopping, we returned to hotel. I am currently doing my laundry and thank goodness the dryer is working properly: I put 2 x 100 yen coins and the timing went up to 60 minutes so I did not have to come down every 30 minutes.

I start to get tiring with having to re-packing my luggages daily because we keep changing cities. My body finally starts to get dry and itchy despite moisturiser from the first day (instead of waiting until it gets itchy before applying like what I did in previous trips). Add on the stupid photos and the good for nothing sister, I am starting to really regret this trip.

I 'dressed down' today since mostly we were in the train station and in the train. I wore normal heat tech + fleece jacket and added on the ultra light down for the hoodie because of the drizzle at Shin-Takaoka earlier. I only wore jeans for the bottom. I am still worried about Shirakawa-go tomorrow as it is expected to be colder with it located in the mountains and I am hoping for snow which means the temperature will be minus.