I did consider another country for our next holiday. I really did! But after much thought, my longing for Japan returned. I guess I’m just too old with not much money to spare to go on a holiday that I’m not sure if it will succeed. But having been to Japan 5 times, I haven’t got any disappointment yet whatsoever. So I recall that a 6th time will not hurt either. The tricky part were the dates. The Cherry Blossom season was over in the mainland and we also wanted to avoid the Golden Week. So we decided to go after the Golden Week and to fly to Sapporo for the Cherry Blossom. It was an amazing idea! Sapporo was so beautiful at this time of the year and I have never seen as many varieties of Cherry Blossom in my entire life. I also love Sapporo’s peaceful atmosphere with few tourists. Although I know that it will be a different story during the winter season especially during the Sapporo Snow Festival in February. But we didn’t fly from Helsinki to Sapporo. Instead we flew in to Chubu Centrair International Airport with the initial idea of walking a part of the Nakasendo trail in Kiso Valley for the last part of this trip before flying back to Helsinki.

We arrived in Nagoya in the evening after a 13 hours flight from Helsinki. It was the best immigration process ever. We just walked straight to immigration with no queue whatsoever! We then took the airport limousine to our hotel. We walked a bit near the hotel to the lake (or was it the sea, or river. At least, a body of water) for a refreshing evening walk with a quick bite of this and that from the convenience store. The next day was an early wake up to our flight to Sapporo. It was a rainy Nagoya and it was a good idea to fly away from the rain.