On our second day in Morioka, we took a day trip to the west. The original idea was to see more fall colors, but we scrapped that in favor of seeing more general nature.

Check out an interactive map of the places I visited here. I will update this map as I continue my journey. This post is about day 7.

We looked up a few places to go the night before and got up early to go to the Mikoda Morning Market. A morning market open almost every day of the year. While researching Morioka, this video came up top and in the video they also mentioned the morning market and it looked awesome!

We went to the morning market expecting to find a bustling market with lots of vendors and quality produce and local dishes. What we found was... well, see for yourself in the next three pictures.The market was completely deserted! The only other people there with us were the vendors. We spent 10 minutes there, had a coffee (served out of a thermos, not even freshly brewed) and went on with our day.

Moral of the story: Don't trust YouTube videos (I often give this advice to other people, but still end up not following my own advice).Our next destination for the day was a hiking area on Mount Akita-Komagatake. It looked beautiful in the pictures we found online, so we let Google Maps lead the way to the mountain. This was a mistake! When we got there, there was nothing. No trails, no open restaurants, nothing. Google Maps said one or more restaurants would be open, but that was wrong. We took a few pictures and continued on our way.

After two of our destinations were not really what we had hoped for, we were getting a little nervous. After all, we didn't come to Japan to be underwhelmed. We were not sure which destination we wanted to go to next. We decided to go to Tsurunoyu Onsen (hot springs), which was close to the mountains anyway.Tsurunoyu Onsen did not disappoint us! We had a very relaxing stay there and it wouldn't have been possible to go there after 3 p.m. because it is also an accommodation and after 3 p.m. only overnight guests can enter the Onsen. So it was actually a good decision!

This Onsen has a mixed-sex area where men and women don't even have to wear clothes, much better than at the Kustatsu Onsen. The reason you don't have to wear clothes: The water is so opaque that you can't even see 2 cm deep.

After the Onsen, we were very relaxed and wanted to take a more scenic route to our next destination: Kakunodate. This turned out to be a happy coincidence. The scenic route went around Lake Tazawa, which we had already seen from the mountain (see the picture with the view from the mountain).The lake was completely flat. Pretty much no one else was there except us. We could tell that this lake must be popular in the spring and summer because the entire shoreline was covered with pedal boats, which are now decommissioned for the fall season.

We were very lucky to find this place. The drive there was also very nice. The mountains around the Onsen didn't show much fall color, the trees were already bare. Around the lake, the trees still had beautiful colors.After a while we reached Kakunodate, which has a lot of well-kept samurai houses that are still in use today. You can visit the houses and get guided tours, but after seeing one house, it becomes kind of pointless to see the rest of the houses because their layout is similar.

One nice thing about Kakunodate: Autumn colors everywhere!Back in Morioka, we went back to our favorite ramen spot: Menya Iori. This time I even took a picture of it.

The first time, the Ramen tasted better though.