Getting Out and About – Great Trips from Nagoya

Dec 26, 2024

Getting Out and About – Great Trips from Nagoya

Due to the planned rebuild in the aftermath of World War 2, Nagoya enjoys a relatively easy to navigate infrastructure for cars. On top of this, the Nagoya area houses one of the main arteries for the national highway system with access points in areas like Takaoka and Hongo.

This means that getting out of the city is a relatively easy affair – not much more than to get in and go! Where to go, however, is the better question. Fortunately, Nagoya has excellent options to the north, east and west and many of them can be done ambitiously in a day or leisurely with an overnight stay.

I Hear the Mountains Calling – Gifu, Nagano and Fukui

Nagoya’s northern neighbors feature very mountaneous roads and an abundance of nature. If you want to go up north at the time of writing, please take proper precautions with your vehicle.

For Gifu, a hidden treasure is the Gifu Family Park  which is out west of the city of Seki. Roughly an hour to an hour and a half from Nagoya, this place is an amazing spot for elementary age (~4th grade) and younger. The rides on display are you standard for the larger parks in Japan – go-karts, bicycle powered rides that take you on a course over part of the park, a grassy hill to slide down on, etc. but having them all in one spot out in the mountains makes it a fun day trip. Be warned – finding parking for a free service like this can feel like Mad Max, so the earlier the better! Do also note the days off and the business hours (use browser translation as best as you can with the link above) as it is closed during New Years and the park will close earlier than normal during the winter months.

Nagano is a winter no-brainer, but be prepared to spend at least one night due to time needed to travel up there. That said, simply type in “Nagano” and “ski” for the bevy of options to appear. Hakuba especially stands out as an excellent location for those looking to partake in winter sports. However, Nagano also has some historical gems like the Magome-Tsumago Trail should you make your journey during a different season. Summer in Nagano’s mountains is absolutely delightful for camping and is the only time in memory that I did not need air conditioning during a Japanese summer’s night.

Fukui will also be harder to do in one day – you will probably need to think of accommodations. One particular highlight is the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum which is frankly awesome. A wealth of skeletons, remains, and other fossil recordings is coupled with an active search field where your kids (or you – let’s be honest. You’re going to join) have a chance at actually finding small fossils during the dig experience. My family also discovered that we really really like Fukui’s style of soy sauce when we stopped by a pub-style restaurant in the evening.

What is Yade? Going West – Mie, Shiga

While the triple threat of Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto are a classic location, the areas between Nagoya and the more well-known Kansai region have a few great spots.

Barely getting out of Nagoya into Mie will present you with Nagashima Spaland – This is pretty well-known and barely qualifies as leaving Nagoya. However, car enthusiasts will be casting their gaze towards Suzuka Circuit as they hear the engines roaring in their heart. I also rather enjoyed the Toba Aquarium as well.

Shiga prefecture tends to not be well-known to foreign residents, but it can be an interesting place to visit especially if you want to do something between Nagoya and, say, Osaka. The Yanmar Museum is quite fun and lets you do a variety of challenges that are well-aimed at the younger elementary school crowd. However, as you may have gathered from looking at the website, English support is very limited. The museum also requires a reservation, so please be prepared to navigate the website with browser-assisted translation to reserve a spot.

Shiga is also home to Lake Biwa which has its own flavor of things to do as the largest freshwater lake in Japan. Other websites cover what to do here rather well, but I would be remiss to not warn you that as of this article’s writing, it’s probably too cold to do any of the really fun stuff.

The Not-So-Far East – Shizuoka

The geography to the east of Nagoya gets pretty mountaneous pretty fast and the major roads will keep you along the coast and funnel you into Shizuoka. Hamamatsu will be there to greet you into Shizuoka and it makes a lovely daytrip location. Hamamatsu is known for certain foods with my favorite being Hamamatsu Gyoza. There are fierce battles each year with the populous voting on who they think puts out the best gyoza in Hamamatsu and the rankings at the top often changing year over year. Why are we getting excited about dumplings? First off – excuse you. The delightful fried batches of dumpling joy known as gyoza are one of life’s finest foods available to the common person in amounts that may or may not land a side eye. However, Hamamatsu gyoza take this a step further by absolutely packing the insides with extra veggies. This gives the whole experience an extra crunch and makes eating a large plate feel trivial.

To help work off your newly obtained belly, you can visit nearby Kakegawa for Kakegawa Kachoen (roughly translating to Bird Park). With a variety of birds allowed to fly around the park grounds, visitors can see the entire range of Mother Nature’s feathered friends.

For meat lovers, I recommend hitting up Sawayaka (also called Genkotsu) as their particular combination of deliciousness and ease of access off of the highway makes them a wonderful pit stop for either coming to or leaving from Shizuoka.

Hopefully this gives you a few good ideas for ways to travel Japan that aren’t Hiroshima, Tokyo, Kansai, Okinawa or Hokkaido. If you know of any other gems, leave a comment!

Image courtesy of Bonguri via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0