early morning bus from shinjuku

8:15 direct bus to Takyama

no more new snow, but rain

plenty of snow

Once arrived in Takayama, started with the float museum:

Then went to the folk village museum:

On the way back to town, found a cafe rescue cafe, worth a stop :)

The very expensive hotel with the only room left:

the first restaurant looked interesting, but the meat was not great

The next morning, first went to visit a local museum and market:

After that, it was time to see the floats and puppet show on top of floats. Those puppets were very nicely animated:

lots of people came to see the show

Then it was a good time for a walk around town and its small museums:

The floats were being displayed around town:

After that, it was a good time to go for for a the pretty mountain walk around town. Higashiyama Walking Course is tricky to follow, thankfully I had my GPS track from 2016 that helped a lot:

found a wild mountain goat

At the end of the walk, was the float museum which, turns out, only had the autumn floats, while the spring floats were outside:

Nextdoor was a small indoor museum with a recreation of Nikko:

After that, it was time to go back to town to visit and see the float parade:

Old town has nice little shops including some beef sushi and yummy ice cream :)

Then the float parade finally arrived:

After that, there was more time to visit town and see fun things:

Unfortunately the evening festival was cancelled due to rain. It looked like a lot of fun, but didn't happen.

And then I did my best to find a better meat restaurant after the disappointing one from the previous night. It was indeed a lot better:

The next morning, there was about 2h to visit town before the trains to Nikko:

Due to light rain, the floats were not able to get out and performed in their respective shelters:

But there was time to see one last museum and a few nice views of town: