Day 4 - Hakodate - June 15

We drove to Hakodate this morning. Our first stop was at a park that used to be a fort, shaped as a 5 pointed star. We walked through the park for about an hour and stopped to get some ice cream. It was the Hokkaido milk ice cream and was different than any other soft serve I have tasted. We absolutely loved it! It has a really good flavor. There is also a tower next to the park, so we took the elevator to the top to see the views of the fort and city. For lunch we stopped at a burger place that serves burgers about a foot tall. Dave and mike both got one. I got a regular cheese burger. Mike was able to finish his tall burger, but Dave and I couldn’t finish ours. We then drove 20 minutes to another really beautiful park in the city. It the most beautiful park I have ever seen. There were wisteria tunnels, but most of the flowers were gone already in June. It would have been amazing in the spring. There were ponds and pathways through beautiful trees and bridges. I loved it. There was also a Japanese old style traditional house, that the park built around it and it now belongs as part of the park. We were able to walk inside and see what it looked like 75 years ago or so. Then we found our hotel and checked in. We had some time until we wanted to go to Mt. Hakodate so we plugged the laptop into the TV and watched Frozen. Mike liked it. When the sun started setting, we walked to the train station. It was less than a mile from our hotel. We took the short train ride to the top of the observatory. The 6 Hakodate missionaries happened to be up there as well since it was p-day, so Mike was really excited to hang out with them for about 30 minutes until they had to head back. We ended up staying there about an hour watching it get darker and more lights from the city below come on. It was a gorgeous view. It got very crossed up there the longer we were there. Fortunately we arrived early enough that we had a good view in the front.