After breakfast at Marie’s family home we drove to a nearby lookout. Unfortunately visibility wasn’t the best, we could only imagine how spectacular it would be on a clear day. You can see the mountains, the ocean, and the surrounding towns. We could even see the mouth of the Shiribetsu river where it enters the sea (the river that runs through Kutchan that we used to cross every day to and from work).

We are now hitting the road again, headed for Hakodate. Hakodate was Japan’s first city to open it’s port to foreign trade in 1854, so there is a lot of history that we are excited to learn about and explore.