Odawara Plum Blossoms

At the weekend, we went to Odawara in Kanagawa to see the plum blossoms.
Taking the Shinkansen again and eating Mac breakfast on the train we arrived early in Odawara station and went to the community center nearby called UMECO.
Here you can rent bicycles. A normal bicycle costs 500 yen for the day (until 4.30 pm), but we decided to be lazy and get electric bicycles which were 1000 yen each. We cycled to the plum blossom area at Shimo-Soga a few kilometers away and watched the local plum festival event.

Then we went to a nearby temple Zuiunji.

There was a free concert, but we were early, so we decided to go to the main plum blossom area instead.
There's a nice ice cream place next to the orchards, so we got ice cream and then wandered around for a while, before deciding to get some food and rent a bamboo mat for 50 yen and lie down in the orchards to eat and relax.

There were thousands of insects lazily drifting around above the trees and birds were tweeting among the blossoms, very relaxing.

After spending a few hours at the festival, we cycled back to UMECO, returned the bikes and then went into Odawara to have Korean food. It was a very nice day.
Unfortunately though it was cloudy that day, the year before was sunny all day when we went and that was superb, this year was just very good. Odawara is only 30 minutes from Tokyo on the bullet train and is definitely worth going to in the early spring to see the blossoms with Mt. Fuji. The area is covered with orchards, temples, shrines and little festivals, its a spring wonderland!

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