1 full day in Nagasaki wasn’t enough. Especially with the rainy weather slowing us down and reducing some of our activities, I wish we could have spent at least another full day here but our time is limited and we need to move onto the next place. Of course on the day we leave, it’s sunny and not freezing cold.

Today wasn’t how I imagined our first full day was going to be in Miyazaki, it exceeded those expectations.

When we were driving down to Cape Toi yesterday, we stopped at a 7-11 to get snacks. As I was enjoying my onigiri rice ball while standing next to the car, I looked up at the street sign, saw monkeys on the sign, and made the executive decision to stop at Kojima Island. I asked Joanna if this was the equivalent of stopping at the Spam Museum or the World’s Largest Ball of Twine back in Minnesota.

One of the must-do activities while in Miyazaki is to visit the Takachiho Gorge. I had mentioned this to Ryoko-san when we checked into our place where she mentioned that the boats needed to be reserved ahead of time. This totally saved our butts because Thursday was a local holiday so naturally all of the boat reservations were taken from 9am-5pm except ONE at 11am. SO LUCKY!

Joanna and I had a shopping list of things to get while in Japan for ourselves and our friends and family but didn’t want the hassle of carrying stuff from city to city. The plan was to use the final 2 days of the trip to stock up. The project manager in me tried to optimize our time by consolidating all the shops we needed to visit into groups so that we didn’t have to spend so much time moving from place to place.