JapanGirl64

  We took an extended trip over the Memorial Day holiday (and my birthday) and visited the Tohoku region of Japan. Tohoku basically covers the northern third of the main island of Honshu. It's a big, beautiful region with the Pacific Ocean on one side, and the Sea of Japan on the other. We got a JR East rail pass that gave us unlimited use of the Shinkansen during our trip, so we were able to jump all around the area from Sendai to Hachinohe to Aomori to Akita. At the end of the trip we each tried to pick our favorite spot or activity and neither of us could pick just one. We loved everything about this trip! Our approach was to combine our Shinkansen trips with car rentals near the major stations. The Shinkansen gets you to the main city and then having a car allows you to easily and conveniently get out to the more remote locations. Just to give a feel for the travel times, it was about 2 hours one way on the train between the major cities (Tokyo to Sendai, Sendai to Aomori, Send...