27 April - Off to Spain - overnight in Dreux

Off to Spain!! Up at 5.30am, left just before 6am, through Dover ferry customs (no queues as finger print scanning tech not yet ready) and parked up before 7am waiting for the ferry to arrive (only 4 cars waiting in front of us). Decided to have a coffee in the cafe and lounged there until the first call for passengers to return to their cars. 

P&O were being a bit keen this morning as we headed out to see our car all on its own as everyone else had boarded!!! No panic though as literally a dozen cars and a school coach trip on board.

Loads of space and seats overlooking the bow. As usual brought our own pastries from Sainsbury's for breakfast 😊.

On the road again by 11.30am with 4 hours of driving to Dreux - our first stop on our journey down. We've not been here before so it was lovely to have plenty of time to explore.

Typical French architecture 

Saint Pierre Church, in the middle of town, currently having some restorative work.

There were some lovely murals

A spot of light refreshment before heading back to our hotel for dinner. 

Tomorrow we're continuing south via Chatres to Saint Flour. 

13 March Shopping Day!

For those more eagle eyed you might have noticed I was a day ahead of myself. So I've amended yesterday's entry to show 12 March and today is 13th!!

Today's mission was to stock up on Peter's selection of Manga and Japanese written books. He's been very successful - 17 for today's hoard! Hopefully they'll keep him busy until the next trip.

Today's, I've never seen that before, was watching a car being parked in a high raise parking facility. In order to get into the parking facility the driver opened the sliding gates, reversed in, got out and pressed the appropriate button. The gate closed and you can see his car half way up on the lifting platform in the middle.

Once at the appropriate level the whole floor it was on mov d across to it's parking spot. Very clever!

On our way to the main shopping streets we took a new route, avoiding the busy bits, and came across 

Higashi Hongan-ji, a Buddhist temple that's currently undergoing repairs. It's definitely very dull in comparison to the temples on the main tourist route.

We just had to make a visit to another Japanese icon - Hello Kitty. A Japanese created character that is over 50 years old! Japan is just full of Hello Kitty merchandise in a wide array of colours and taking a variety of forms. Very cute!

Tonight it's been an opportunity to try out our final Japanese meal, before squashing everything into our bags. I might have to wear a few extra layers to get all our purchases home😄. An earlier night as we have an early morning start - our flight is 09.35 with a 15 hour flight ahead of us.

12 March Ueno Park

We stayed local today taking the bus along to Ueno Park.

In Japan cherry blossom is a big thing. The only problem is that anything on the pink colour spectrum that is blossoming is being photographed by everyone in the hope that it's cherry blossom! Sometimes it is, but mostly it's plum!

There's even manhole covers depicting the blossom.

At Ueno Park they're gearing up for the Cherry Blossom festival starting this weekend. Stalls were being constructed, posters advising against making fires or laying out blankets for 'banquets'! It's certainly big business.

There's a substantial zoo which you can access for about £3. It used to have pandas until China took them back at the beginning of the year.

Entry to the zoo means you can also see one of the oldest pagodas in the area - built in 1639. The zoo was built around it!

There's also the occasional tea house in the grounds.

Is this cherry blossom?

Or perhaps this is? I'm sure that we must've seen the actual thing at least once on this trip. Not what we'd expected though as the season is usually more towards the end of March but with the warmer weather it's uncharacteristically blossoming in the earlier part of March. So a bit of a surprise for us as visiting in Cherry Blossom season is peak season for visiting Japan and we'd planned our dates to avoid it!

My first Pokémon manhole cover!!

Well, only one more whole day in Japan so tomorrow we will be packing in anything we've missed as well as making time for shopping 😁.