After
the weekend in Kamakura, hubby and I met up with C. and A. at
Tokyo Station where the four of us took the
shinkansen to
Gifu for a stay at an onsen ryokan in
Takayama. Neither of them had been an onsen before, and as expected both were extremely shy about the inevitable nudity. So a couple of months prior to their arrival, we did some research for a top notch onsen ryokan with private in-room baths, which makes even more sense in this particular case given it was C. and A.'s honeymoon.
From the same book where we learned of
Iwanoyu at Seni Onsen, we found
Katsuragi no Sato, which was a good 1 hour and 20 minutes scenic bus ride way up in the mountain. Look at this view. Wow.
Too bad I then proceeded to fall asleep. I vowed to stay
awake on the way down, and I was able to catch some good photos, but
most of the awesome views turned out to be on the other side of the road on the way
up =.="
Anyway, the ryokan was nice and large but nowhere near the size of Iwanoyu. They only have ten rooms, and of those ten rooms only two come with a private open-air bath in the room's backyard. Luckily for us, we called far enough ahead that those two rooms were still available. Of course we snatched up both, one for ourselves and the other for C. and A. Still, we had no idea who got which room, how much each room, or even how big. I guess that's just how Japan works, heavily fueled by and dependent on trust.
The ryokan's brochure that I kept.
