Our Hiroshima visit centered around two main activities – visiting the Peace Park and Museum and going to Miyajima Island.
Originally we planned one night in Hiroshima and one night on Miyajima. We planned to leave Osaka in the morning and spend the afternoon at the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park and Museum. We would take the ferry to Miyajima the next day, spend the day and night there, and then make our way back to Hiroshima and then on to Kyoto.
We had booked a traditional Japanese ryokan, with tatami mats on the floor, futons to sleep on, and a kaiseki meal. I thought this would be an amazing and unique experience that would be perfect for one night. But the longer we were traveling and the more worn-out we became, the less appealing this seemed to be. We had gotten used to two separate rooms and relatively comfortable beds, and the reality was that I knew we wouldn’t eat 80% of the lovingly prepared meal that was served to us. And while we had started the trip with 5 nights in Tokyo, since then we had been moving around a lot and spending only 1 or 2 nights per stop, which was starting to be draining.
And after the Hakone debacle, I was leery of another overnight trip. Like Hakone, the Miyajima side trip was one of the things I was most looking forward to. I couldn’t face another total failure. I was worried about the logistics and effort of changing hotels four times in four days and the weather foiling our plans again. The last thing I wanted was to feel stuck again in someplace that I knew could be amazing but for one reason or another wasn’t working out for us.
So while we were in Hakone we started rethinking our Miyajima plans. The first thing we had to do was find out if we could extend our stay in our Hiroshima hotel. It didn’t make sense to cancel Miyajima and then have to move hotels in Hiroshima. Once we got confirmation that we could add on a night there, we talked it over as a family and decided to cancel the overnight in Miyajima and do it as a day trip instead.
With the obvious exception of where we were sleeping, this change didn’t really alter our plans very much. We still visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Peace Memorial Park the afternoon we arrived in Hiroshima and we still spent the next day on Miyajima. We just did it as a day trip instead of an overnight.
Of course, the irony is that our Miyajima day was our only perfect weather day of the entire trip and we all fell in love with the island and would have loved staying overnight. But we have no regrets about changing plans. It was a really easy day trip – the ferry was a 5 minute walk from our hotel and a beautiful and relaxing 45 minute ride to the island. We had plenty of time on the island and got to see and do everything we wanted at a relaxed pace. And our Hiroshima hotel ended up being our absolute favorite of the trip and we were thrilled to have an extra night there. If we had had multiple nights to spread over Hiroshima and Miyajima, an overnight on Miyajima would have made more sense. But two one-night stays in a row was simply too much moving around at that point in our 2+ week trip.
