Keepsake shopping on the Tohoku Expressway

We recently went on a road trip to and through the six prefectures of Tohoku. The goal was Aomori, the northernmost Prefecture on Honshu (Japan's largest / main island). We did visit them all, but the plan was to stay in three prefectures on the way up and the other three on the way back down. However, things didn't go quite to schedule, as we ended up staying in Akita much longer than planned. 

To cut a long story short, we ended up driving back from Aomori TO SAITAMA, on the last day. An (almost) eight hour trip on expressways, if we didn't take any breaks. But we did take breaks, plenty of them. In fact, we ended up doing a tour of the parking and service areas on the Tohoku expressway. And it ended up being a lot of fun and thee highlight of the whole trip for one of my four children!

We have a lot of family in Akita, that is one of the reasons we stayed there longer than originally planned. Thanks to that family, my kids ended up with quite a bit of money! So they decided that they wanted to buy some keepsakes on the drive on the way home. Thankfully, it would seem they are not the only ones, because many of the service areas cater to this market - keepsake shopping.

My two youngest were able to collect keyrings for each of the six prefectures of Tohoku that we visited. It was a lot of fun for them to peruse all the different items on offer and find a small token to represent the Tohoku prefectures. As you can see in the photo below, the names of the prefectures are printed on the back of the keyring. Clockwise from the top (but not in order of how they are geographically); Akita, Iwate, Fukushima, Miyagi (facing forward), Yamagata and Aomori.

My husband and I often went on road trips before the children were born, but this is the first time we've done such a long one with the kids. Despite not going to plan, it far exceeded our expectations and ended up being one of our most memorable vacations to date. We will definitely be doing more of them in the future. Have you ever been on a road trip in Japan? Any route you would recommend?