A Bicycle Trip to North of Nagoya

On February 23rd, I went looking for some used/discount furniture stores.  Doing this, I had a chance to visit slightly outside of the Nagoya city boundaries to the town of Toyoyama and city of Kasugai.  Here is the map of the journey (interactive map):

The interactive map has pictures that I take along the way with my phone so you can see where things are.

Here is view of the large river that goes through the north of Nagoya (note the tall building in the distance):

The built-up area north of Nagoya has still pretty high density of housing (basically, everywhere) but there are sometimes nice fields by the houses where people grow things:

Good example here is some nice daikon (Japanese radish):

Some bird was also interested in this field:

While still built-up, the area has a different (slower/quieter) feel to it.  Japan is criss-crossed by railways.  When you watch Japanese movies/anime you often see railway crossings that people go through and have to wait for a train that goes by.  Well, I found such stereotypical ones on this journey - here is a larger one on a street:

I biked along the railroad tracks:

Another field of things:

Here is a pedestrian only crossing and I managed to see a train coming so got my camera ready.  I did catch the train as it was rolling past the crossing:

At some point, I went by the old Nagoya airport (before the new Centrair airport was opened in 2005).  The funny thing is that the old airport (now called Nagoya Airfield) is situated in 4 different towns: Toyoyama (most of it - west part), Komaki (top part), Kasugai (east part) and a tiny bit in Nagoya (south-west tip).  Here is a picture of the airport - although you can't really see much:

Another nice field by a house.  These fields must have been nice some years ago but now some of them are next to busy streets - the food can't be all that healthy anymore, can it?

A street I was biking along:

I found the OFF HOUSE store which is a part of the OFF chain of stores (you can see the HARD OFF store in the back).  They sell used items but the most popular is BOOK OFF that sells books:

I found a nice K's denki store which is a chain of electric/electronic supermarkets:

Ohhh.. a fishing store:

Found a large mall along the way so I sent in - and actually had some food inside.  It also had a large discount store packed tight with items:

Inside, I found a happy bear that was happily moving along a pole:

I also went by the tall building from the picture above (of the river).  Now, this is a tall apartment building:

Back along standard Nagoya streets, I found a nice ume tree (see the umemi post for more detail/pictures) by a house:

I found a little river:

where some big fish were trying to swim but the water level was so low that their backs were sticking out of the water:

Even though the furniture hunting was a bit disappointing, it was a very nice journey of around 22km.