Hey Hive!
I'm currently recounting our anniversary trip to Tokyo back in Feb 2023! It'd been at least 3 years since we visited Tokyo and the last time was pre-covid so we decided to go back and find some new places to explore while revisiting our favourite hot-spots.
Last week, we continued our bus tour to the mountains of Japan, in Gunma. After a 2 hour drive we arrived at Tambara Tokyu Resort and enjoyed a buffet lunch before going sledding for the first time!
It was actually really fun and was perfect for us since we're not daring enough to try skiing or snowboarding.
It was pretty perfect weather that time too, with some sunshine so it wasn't too cold up there in the mountains.
Anyway time to continue on our tour!
7 Feb 2023. Tuesday.
After we left the ski resort, we drove back down the mountain to regular street level.
We ended up going to this town with a big greenhouse for our next destination!
We headed inside the greenhouse for our next buffet - fresh strawberries!
There were rows upon rows of strawberry plants in the greenhouse that I guess were just ripe for the picking.
Japanese strawberries are very famous and those that are specially bred can be very expensive. I guess these must be the low grade strawberry plants since these are used for tourists to pick. But either way, it was still strawberries and I love them!
There were a lot of strawberries that were ripe but also some that were still small. I was surprised to see some white ones as well since they tend to be the more expensive ones. I'm not sure these particular white ones meant that they were not ripe yet but some of them were quite soft already.
We only had about half an hour here to eat our fill our strawberries so we made sure to grab as much as we could. You'd think that these strawberries wouldn't taste as good but they were still pretty juicy and sweet!
We did try one of the white strawberries but they actually didn't taste as sweet or juicy as the red ones.
I think that might've been our first time trying a white one too, maybe it really just wasn't ripe yet. Although some of them did look quite large already.
They also gave us these plastic trays with condensed milk in them. I'm not sure why, but I guess some people like dipping the strawberries in condensed milk? I thought they were sweet enough on their own though and the milk made it too sweet.
I wanted to get a good shot of just how many strawberries there were, but I also wanted to eat as many as I could. It was a struggle.
Of course there were the other tourists in our group munching away as well, and we made sure to take an aisle to ourself.
I didn't really use the condensed milk they gave me, eventually my whole tray was just filled with the strawberry leaves.
It was probably the healthiest buffet we've ever eaten, but still so delicious! I don't know how many strawberries we ate there but it felt like we had 2 regular boxes each.
We only ever buy the cheap strawberries when we're in Japan. Some of these look like the ones we buy in the supermarket too, so I'm wondering if these are the kind of farms they grow them in.
I've never seen strawberry flowers before, and these looked pretty.
We managed to get some good shots of the berries and had our tummies full of healthy vitamins so all in all I'd say this was definitely the best part of the tour.
Anyway, after about half an hour or so we unfortunately had to leave. I wish we could've taken some strawberries home but I guess they can't let us do that if not the whole greenhouse will be empty. I can definitely see why people like going fruit picking now though.
But that's gonna be it for now! Next week: another destination and activity, the last one for this tour!
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
Check out my previous post in this series!
TacoCat’s Travels #283 (Tokyo): Snowy Sledding Adventure!
