Day 08 @ Kanazawa – Kenrokuen Garden

No matter what the adults schedule for our family vacation itinerary, the kids – or Peter at the very least – has been really looking forward to just one thing this trip: and that’s snow. Lots of it. When we were finalising our next day itinerary yesterday evening, we saw that light snow with some rain was expected on the next day, 18 Dec:

And that was exactly what happened today: it started lightly snowing while we were at our hotel having breakfast, then stopped when we were started making our way to the Kenrokuen Garden by way of the Kanazawa Loop Bus (¥600 for adults for a day pass, purchased at the Bus Information Counter). A 10 minute ride later right when we got to the entrance of the garden, we got snow pellets first, followed then by a combination of snow, rain and wind!

Kenrokuen is regarded as one of the top three most beautiful landscaped gardens in the country, so a visit to the park was always going to be one of our trip’s highlights. What we didn’t expect was our first visit to a landscaped garden while it’s snowing. In short, unlike the lush greenery of Japanese gardens I saw in September in 2019, or the stunning late Autumn colors at Kokoen Garden @ Himeji just a few days earlier, we got to experience Kenrokuen in a layer of white.

The garden was also fairly busy with buses offloading large groups of visitors to the site. Most of them were locals from what I could hear when they spoke, but there was also a smaller group of Singaporeans/Malaysians exploring the area. But Kenrokuen is large enough that the place didn’t feel congested, thankfully.

We spent an hour exploring the garden, and the weather alternated between dark overcast => brief sunshine => snow => snow hail => rain, and there was even the occasional thunder heard too.

Continued in the next post at Kanazawa Castle Park!