Fall Trip Part 3: Minoo Park
Sunday, November 30, 2014
On Sunday the 23rd Jonathan and I went to Minoo Park in northern Osaka. But first we stopped at Namba Station on the way to eat breakfast at Starbucks.
There was a cool old building near the station. I wonder what it was.
At Starbucks I got the Snow Maple Toffee latte and a cinnamon roll. So perfect!
Then we headed to the park. When we switched at Umeda Station we were excited by the shiny trains.
It took about 40-45 minutes to get the park because we had to switch trains several times. The trains in Osaka are kind of annoying and don't connect well. It was like that everywhere we went.
The park was more crowded than we expected. We followed the crowd along the main path because we figured everyone was going to the waterfall, the main attraction of the park.
The trail was a lot longer than we expected (2.6 km from the park entrance I think) and we were in a crowd the whole time, but most of the time it wasn't too bad. In a few narrow areas it got a bit slow.
We came to a standstill at that point and thought it was a line to get up to the waterfall, but luckily it was just slow because the path became very narrow.
There was a crowd around the waterfall of course, but it actually didn't take long to get to the front. The pictures kind of look worse than it actually was.
On the way out of the park we took a different path for most of the way. It wasn't paved and was steeper and rockier, but much less crowded. The only bad thing about it was that I wasn't really wearing good shoes for actual hiking. Also, I didn't see many girls in cutesy shoes there. When Jonathan and I visited a cave in Hamamatsu I was one of the few girls in tennis shoes. A lot of girls had heels. In a cave. The cave wasn't much of a hike, but still... So I was kind of surprised in Osaka.
On the way back I passed a few stalls selling momiji tempura, fried maple leaves. They didn't really seem that appetizing, but I had read about them and wanted to try them. Unfortunately the lines were pretty long and I didn't want to stand in line for something that probably wasn't actually very good. I mostly just wanted to try them because they're weird. But I was still a bit disappointed about that.
Near the park there is a hotel with a really cool elevator up to the hotel. Jonathan and I kind of wanted to ride the elevator but weren't sure if we should since we weren't staying at the hotel. Looking back I kind of wish we had anyway.
When we got back to the station there was a long line to buy tickets and then another line to get into the station. Though fortunately once we got our tickets it didn't take too long to get into the station and we were able to get on a train right away.
Minoo Park was very impressive. It was a lot bigger than I expected. The fall colors were beautiful. Some trees were past peak, many were at peak, and some were still green. So I think it has a long amount of time that it looks nice in the fall. Even though it was crowded, it was still very enjoyable, and I think you could avoid most of the crowds by taking the rougher trails.