74F in Sapporo on Thursday Morning at 8:45am
Chet -- RIP Hank. Sorry for your loss, but it sounds as if Hank lived a full good life. May he chase butterflies or whatever he liked chasing in Heaven now.
Yesterday we took a day trip out into the country side of Hokkaido to some place called "Farm Tomita". It is a commercial farm known for Lavender and other flowers, as well as melons. (Hokkaido as a whole is known for melons, meaning cantaloupe type and honeydew type mostly). We took one limited express train for about 85 minutes to another city called Asahikawa, and there got on an older diesel multiple unit train that was a "extra" (not on normal schedule except during the summer) and went to a temporary station called "Lavender Farm". This is a wooden platform set up in the country side and special trains stop at it for tourists going to this farm. They have a special train called Norokko that serves this station and other locales nearby as well as this "extra" train (once a day) we took from Asahikawa. Normal locals do not stop at it.
After eating melon flavored soft ice cream (and some lavender scented soft ice cream and other sweets scented with lavender -- quite the tourist trap) and wandering around the lavender (which was mostly harvested already -- end of season) and commercial flower beds, we got on the Norokko train for about 3-4 minutes to the next normal stop where we caught an old KiHa 150 DMU (2 cars) that took an hour to cover the 35 min back to Asahikawa, where we took another limited express back to Sapporo.
While we did hear some Japanese (and a little English) at the farm area, most of what we heard is Chinese. It seems Japan has been invaded by Chinese tourists now-a-days. I guess as long as they spend a ton all is good. (And they do seem to spend a ton).
Here are a few pics.
The 789 Series EMU set HL-1006 limited express we took from Sapporo to Asahikawa.
The "extra" DMU train we took out to the "Lavender Farm" station (at the station -- you can see it is just a temporary wooden platform set up)
The station sign set up for the temporary station
The expensive melons for sale (and these are cheap compared to some) (current rate is 106 JPY to 1 USD so figure 100 to 1 for easy math)
The Norokko special train that we took from the farm to the next normal station (depending on where we wanted to go we could have ridden it longer). The car was a semi-open with wooden benches -- on one side parallel to the wall, facing the wall, so you can look out the window -- a special sight seeing train car of older vintage. The locomotive is a DE15 diesel, which were originally built as snowplow trains (obviously the plow is removed here) and are based on the DE10 locomotive.
The KiHa 150 DMU we took back to Asahikawa. (From there we took the same 789 Series EMU limited express, same set even -- HL-1006 -- back to Sapporo)