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I will start this article by admitting that we didn’t choose Hokkaido specifically for our kids. It was my wife and I who wanted to go there. Badly.
In the past, we had already taken our kids to Osaka to see cherry blossoms, to Tokyo (see our Tokyo itinerary) and Tashirojima Cat Island (on this same trip, and even to Kyoto (if you count when one of them was inside my wife’s womb!) On those places, we did the children’s activities. But this one was for us!
Nevertheless, I still planned our Hokkaido trip with the kids in mind. We did virtually no “kid-focused” activities. But – no major surprise – they still loved it! (Lesson: you don’t HAVE to go to theme parks for your kids to enjoy a trip!)
In this article, I will share how we planned our trip, rented a car and drove around Hokkaido for 8 days, and which parts our kids (age 8 and 10 at the time) loved the most. I have another post about how we planned our Hokkaido road trip itinerary, but I’ll also cover that below.
Table of Contents
What Our Kids Enjoyed Most in Hokkaido
Before I get down to the day-to-day details of trip, I thought it would be fun to start with the results. What were my kids’ favorite parts of visiting Hokkaido?
I asked my kids for their top-5 right after the trip. These highlights (from their perspective) may help you decide whether planning a trip to Hokkaido with kids is right for your family!
All the Soft Serve Ice Cream
Anyone who travels with kids knows how important ice cream is for the kids on the road. It’s often the highlight of the day for them. And Hokkaido has some amazing ice cream!
Hokkaido is famous for its dairy. Even in Taiwan, where our kids grow up, we often see specialty products made with Hokkaido milk.
My kids especially love soft serve ice cream, and that’s what we found the most in Hokkaido.
Some of the more interesting or downright weird flavors we encountered on our trip were pudding, melon (Hokkaido is famous for its melons), lavender (also famous for this), cheese (at a Furano Cheese Factory), bright blue soda (to match Shirogane Blue Pond), and black squid ink.
Driving around in our Vroomy
So we rented a Toyota Roomy to drive around Hokkaido. When booking it, my kids chose that car specifically, because it was cute and cube-shaped. They dubbed it our “Vroomy” because it vrooms around. It was only a few dollars more than getting a Corolla, the same car we drive at home.
The week before we went to Hokkaido, we had visited Tokyo, Nikko, and Tashirojima Island, all without car. So by the time we reached Hokkaido for the second week of our trip, our kids were already pooped from so many days with tons of walking.
The kids freakin’ loved having the car. This meant no more being shushed on trains. No more hauling our luggage around. Stopping anywhere we felt like. Long drives where mom and dad talk about life and they read books in the back – a familiar experience just like back home.
Despite the familiarity, the kids also had many laughs watching me get used to driving on the left side of the road, squeezing into the tiniest of parking spaces, and taking the wrong turn more than a few times.
For me, driving around Hokkaido surprised me in that it reminded me so much of home (Western Canada). So many scenes were straight out of British Columbia, like rural farmland backed by mountains, dairy and fresh fruit farms, hot springs, flower fields, and so on. Just with more rice paddies!
Noboribetsu Onsen
Our family loves hot springs, but in Japan most of them don’t allow tattoos (my wife and I both have some). Most are also nude and sex-separated, but we hoped to find at least one where we could enjoy it together as a family.
In my research, Dai-ichi Takimotokan in Noboribetsu (see on Booking / Agoda) came up as one of the few onsens in Hokkaido which both allows tattoos and has a section where families can swim and bathe together.
The only catch was the price – this resort was by far the most expensive of our trip, especially once we added the breakfast and dinner buffet on one of the nights (the buffet was exquisite and absolutely worth it!)
And of course our kids loved it. Not just the swimming pool with slide and outdoor hot tub with epic view of a volcanic crater.
But the whole experience – choosing traditional robes when checking in, staying in a tatami room, the games room in the resort, the location beside an active volcanic crater, and the all-you-can-eat soft serve in the buffet.
Staying in Traditional Hotels
Besides Noboribetsu, our kids’ other favorite stay was at Highland Furano (see on Booking / Agoda), a traditional hotel just outside of Furano. Yes, you can stay in hotels like this anywhere in Japan, but my kids still cited it as one of their top-5 things about Hokkaido.
Furano is known for its flowers, and this hotel overlooks a field of lavender. But the kids just loved the room itself, the traditional robes, sleeping on tatami mats, hanging out in the closet (they turned it into their own personal bunk bed), the traditional bathhouse, and buying drinks and snacks from the many vending machines.
This hotel’s bathhouse was the normal kind – nude and sex-segregated. My kids had been apprehensive about going nude, but we had made them try it once at Noboribetsu.
It took each of them approximately 20 seconds to get used to it, so by the time we got to this hotel, they were pros and loved it.
Hokkaido Food
I should start by mentioning that my kids are half Taiwanese and grew up in Taiwan. Taiwan has a lot of Japanese food and they already loved it before this trip. My kids eat some things that I know North American kids wouldn’t touch.
With that in mind, my kids LOVED the food in Hokkaido. Besides ice cream, which is so important that it got its own entry, my kids’ all-time favorite Japanese food is ikura don (salmon roe on rice).
Hokkaido is said to have the best ikura in Japan, and ikura don originated there. My kids could eat it for every meal and never get tired of it. When we did the fancy buffet at Noboribetsu onsen? Half their plate was ikura.
My son especially is also a ramen aficionado, and our whole family agreed that the ramen we had at Sapporo’s Ganso Ramen Yokocho (Ramen Alley) was the best we’ve ever had. I especially loved my ramen with cheese and butter!
Other special Hokkaido foods they liked were all the melon flavored things (we were there at the start of melon season, but the melons are crazy expensive!), soup curry (our kids are already Japanese curry fans, and this is a soupier version of it), and the Hokkaido cheese pizza we had at Furano Cheese Factory.
How I Planned Our Hokkaido Itinerary
We had one week (actually 8 nights) to work with for our Hokkaido trip. Hokkaido is very large, and I admit that one week is not enough to do it justice.
Our Japan trip was two weeks in total, and our first week was devoted to Tokyo (where we did more kid-focused activities), Nikko, and Tashirojima Cat Island (our kids are massive cat freaks, so Cat Island was half the reason we were going to Japan).
Normally, most people would just fly from Tokyo to Sapporo, which is probably cheaper than taking the shinkansen (bullet train), or start their Japan trip in Sapporo.
But because of our stop at Cat island, which is halfway between Tokyo and Hokkaido on the coast of Honshu, it made sense for us to take the shinkansen from Tokyo to Sendai (for Cat Island) and Sendai on to Hakodate (the terminal end of the shinkansen line, at the southern tip of Hokkaido).
We would then rent a car and FINISH out trip in Sapporo, flying from there back to Taiwan.For me, as the Vroomy driver, I liked the idea of starting our car rental (and my driving-on-the-left-side experience) in a smaller city, where it would be much easier to drive, rather than a huge one like Sapporo.
In total, we stayed in four places in Hokkaido, for two nights each: Hakodate, Noboribetsu, Furano, and Sapporo.
Upon arriving in Hakodate on the shinkansen, we wanted to stay for a couple nights because it sounded like a cool port city. We would make a small and easy half-day trip to Onuma Quasi National Park (less than an hour away) so I could get used to driving in Japan.
We knew that Noboribetsu was a must for us, for the family-friendly hot spring, so that would be our second stop. On the way to it, we would make a stop at Lake Toya, a beautiful volcanic caldera lake.
For our third stop, we had to add Furano, which is famous for its multi-colored fields of flowers (and ski resorts in winter!)
I also wanted to visit Asahi-dake, Hokkaido’s tallest peak, in Daisetsuzan National Park. Originally in my planning, I thought we’d spend a night at this hostel near the gondola station.
However, it turned out they were closed for renos and every other hotel near it was crazy expensive. So we just stayed in Furano and drove there as a day trip.
Then, of course, our fourth and final stop was Sapporo, where we would drop off our Vroomy and explore the city on foot.
We didn’t plan too many activities for Sapporo – mainly we wanted to do most of our shopping there because it was our final stop in Japan.
If you have more time in Hokkaido, there are so many more national parks, coastlines, remote areas, onsens, hikes, and probably some kid-friendly activities that we basically ignored, too.
I really feel like we just scratched the surface, but it was a very satisfying scratch!
How the Plan Worked Out
While my plan seemed perfect (and travel planning is kinda my thang), things don’t always turn out according to plan. Here’s how the trip actually turned out.
Days 1-2: Hakodate
We arrived in Hakodate on a very late shinkansen from Sendai (where we had visited Cat Island that morning).
Exhausted as we stepped off our final train of the day, our first Hokkaido surprise was the weather – it was COLD! The temperature was nearly 10 degrees cooler than what it had been in Tokyo.
My kids live in Canada now, so they welcomed the chilly weather (“Do we HAVE to put our sweaters on?”)
Luckily, our hotel, Premier Hotel Cabin President (see on Booking / Agoda) was right across the street, where we promptly checked in and crashed.
This modern hotel was very nice and somehow one of the cheapest on our whole trip! Hokkaido in general is a little cheaper than other parts of Japan. Bonus!
I had made big plans for Hakodate – start with the famous Hakodate Morning Market (also right next to our hotel), pick up our Vroomy, drive to Onuma Quasi National Park, go to this cool tea shop by the sea, and finish the day by watching the sunset from Mt. Hakodate, with its famous view over the city.
In practice, we only did about half that. We liked the Hakodate Morning Market much more than Tsukiji Outer Market in Tokyo. It was less touristy and the prices far more reasonable. The kids got their fill of fish eggs but didn’t love seeing all the live crabs tied up.
The weather was cool and rainy, so we made it to Onuma Quasi National Park but the views were obscured. We strolled for a couple hours to the various islands connected by trails and bridges. It was OK, but nothing so memorable. The best part was the melon and squid ink ice cream. The worst part was the wind and light rain.
The seaside tea shop I planned to visit in Hakodate turned out to be closed that day, and we couldn’t be bothered to go up the mountain for the famous city view in the rain.
Instead, we ended up spending a few hours checking out some local grocery stores and stationery shops, which to be honest, my kids and wife enjoyed more than going up a mountain.
We finished our day with dinner Daimon Yokocho, a cute, narrow alley of little restaurants.
My planned restaurant (Crab House) was fully booked for hours (you need to be vigilant when each restaurant only has like 6 seats!) So we ended up just sitting at the first place we found that actually had space.
At night, Emily and I managed to sneak out and have a quick date/drink at the bar in our hotel. After missing the view from Mt. Hakodate, we got to enjoy the view from the bar instead.
We could even see the lights of the little gondolas going up the mountain (note the little red light in the pic below, to the right of the bartender’s head!)
Days 3-4: Noboribetsu Onsen
On day three, we drove about 3 hours from Hakodate to Noboribetsu. On the way, we made a little detour to this epic viewpoint of Lake Toya. This was our first experience of the awesome natural scenery of Hokkaido.
Dai-ichi Takimotokan Resort (see on Booking / Agoda) in Noboribetsu was awesome from the moment we arrived. The kids loved choosing their own robes and slippers at check-in. The tatami room was large and came with welcome snacks.
From our window, we could see steam rising from the adjacent volcanic crater. We spend the rest of the day at the family pool, with waterslide and outdoor hot rub with the best view of the crater (even better than the views from the naked pools!)
For dinner, we ate at our kids’ favorite restaurant in Japan: 7-Eleven. I only ordered the buffet for our second night at the resort because it literally doubled the room price.
Our second day at Noboribetsu was one of the best days of our whole Japan trip. We started by walking through Noboribetsu Jigokudani Valley (Hell Valley), which is right next to the resort. The volcanic landscape in the valley is awesome!
From there, we followed a path up over a hill and down the other side to steaming Oyunuma Pond. The kids enjoyed the quiz questions posted along the way, with the answers always revealed on the next one.
From Oyunuma, we walked to River Oyunuma Natural Footbath, where we soaked our feet in the hot spring creek and the kids played in the little waterfall there.
In the last afternoon, my daughter had really wanted to see the small performance by this animatronic god on the street in front of the resort. At a few set times per day, the god plays some music and briefly changes into a demon. She diligently video-recorded the whole thing with one of our phones.
There are actually all kinds of demon statues around Noboribetsu. The God of Hell is an icon of the city and can be seen on all of the souvenirs there.
Back at the resort, we headed to the dinner buffet, where we absolutely pigged out on some of our favorite foods.
The highlight for my wife and I were the full crab legs (worth the buffet cost alone!) and sashimi, while the kids ate their weight in fish roe and soft serve ice cream.
The next morning, we were literally still full, but still did our best to get our money’s worth at the equally excellent breakfast buffet.
Noboribetsu has a gondola up to a bear park (we had no interest) and view of a caldera lake.
Days 5-6: Furano
Furano is one of the most famous and touristy areas in Hokkaido. Asian tourists in particular flock here in summer to see the rainbow fields of flowers and in winter to go skiing.
Arriving in the area by Vroomy (again about a 3 hour drive), our first stop was Furano Cheese Factory, where the kids enjoyed tasting Hokkaido cheese pizza, cheese soft serve ice cream, and even the black squid ink cheese.
We had intended to try one of the DIY activities there, like butter or ice cream making (pretty much the only kid-focused activity on our whole Hokkaido itinerary), but the timing didn’t work out so we didn’t even do that. The kids didn’t care – we had just done a ton of DIY activities in Taiwan before this trip.
Next, we stopped in at Furano Winery so my wife and I could try some Hokkaido wines (we didn’t love them, but it was still fun to visit).
Then we checked into our “traditional” hotel, Highland Furano (see on Booking / Agoda), which our kids cited as one of their top five things in Hokkaido.
Their favorite part of the hotel was hanging out in the blanket closet, which they converted into their own personal bunk beds.
Our Day 6 was a big day of exploration by car. We started with vibrantly colored Shirogane Blue Pond and Shirogane Waterfall, which were both incredibly beautiful.
These were about an hour’s drive from our hotel. Both are a very short and easy walk from the parking lot.
Then we went to admire the beautiful paintings at Goto Sumio museum. This Japanese artist painted huge scenes of Japan and beyond.
Finally, we drove all the way to Asahi-dake Ropeway (official site) in Daisetsuzan National Park. Before we even got there, I knew we weren’t going to have good views on the gondola. The weather was again just crap – super cloudy and a bit rainy.
But I’m never one to give up on a plan, so we still forked over the money for the gondola and rode up. My daughter hated the ride and cried on the way up (she always hates things like that at first, but then overcomes it – she loved it on the way down).
We could barely see anything as we rode up through the fog, but what we could see was still eerily beautiful.
Then came another surprise when we got to the top: it was still winter up there! I had known that there could still be a bit of snow up there in early June, but I didn’t expect so much of it. Everything, included all the trails, was covered in deep snow.
Having just come from like 8 months of snow in Canada, snow is really nothing special for us (I know that for many Asian travelers, they will travel to another country just for the chance to see snow).
Still, we made the best of it with the shoes that we had. My kids and I managed to climb up a slippery slope and then do a short hike to a small alpine lake. It definitely wasn’t the 2-3 hour hike I had originally planned to do up there!
The next morning, something crazy happened: for the first time since we had arrived in Japan, the weather was actually good! We even caught a glimpse of blue sky!
Thus, we spent our final morning in the area checking out the Furano’s famous flower gardens. We knew that we were in Hokkaido too early for the flowers (July and August are peak season and we were there in early June).
So we were surprised to find that some of the flower farms already had plenty of flowers. Farm Tomita was the best one. According to the kids, the lavender ice cream was the best part, even though none of the lavender was growing yet. We also stopped in at Tomita Melon House next door, but the melons were so expensive!
Next we tried Panoramic Flower Gardens Shikisai-no-oka near Biei, Furano’s sister flower city, but most of the flowers there were not blooming yet. The setting was gorgeous, though, with Asahi-dake dominating the view, so it would be gorgeous in summer.
Days 7-8: Sapporo
After our morning of flower viewing in Furano, we drove to Sapporo via a slower but more scenic route (3 hours instead of 2), mainly to avoid the pricey highway tolls and because we were in no major rush.
In Sapporo, we dropped off the Vroomy and checked into Plat Hostel Keikyu Sapporo Ichiba (see on Booking / Agoda). I had chosen a cheaper hostel stay for our last city to balance out the chunk of cash I’d dropped on the resort in Noboribetsu.
In the hostel, we had a private room with bunk beds, which obviously the kids loved. We chose the hostel for its location near Nijo Morning Market, Odori Park, and the central shopping area, but it was a 30-minute walk from the train station.
For dinner, we trekked over to Ganso Ramen Yokocho (Ramen Alley). We had some of the best ramen of our lives at this ramen shop.
The staff were friendly to our kids and even offered to take pictures for us. When we left (always early meals with kids), we found there was a long line outside, so apparently it’s very popular. I loved my cheese and butter ramen!
We also saw the famous neon signs at Susukino Intersection nearby.
For our final day in Sapporo (and Japan!), I purposely didn’t plan much. I’m sure there are a bunch of kid-friendly things to do there, but we didn’t do them. We wanted to go shopping.
Specifically, my wife wanted to buy clothes, I wanted to stock up on Japanese snacks at MEGA Don Quijote, and my son wanted to find a very specific stuffie related to his favorite video game, which is not a very well-known one.
I’m happy to report that after trying multiple toy shops and otaku (nerd product) department stores in both Tokyo and then Sapporo, we finally found his stuffie, at the last possible shop we were going to check that day.
He has wanted that stuffie for years. Needless to say, he was VERY pleased.
We also found time to visit Odori Park, with the iconic Sapporo TV Tower at one end. It was there that we realized we had accidentally visited Sapporo during Yosakoi Soran Festival, as there were many groups of costumed dancers practicing in the park.
We followed one of those groups for a few blocks to find the performance location. There we found thousands of spectators watching dance performances on the street. We watched the performances for a couple hours – a final nice surprise before leaving Hokkaido.
There was only one specific sight I couldn’t miss in Sapporo: the Sapporo Beer Museum.
Obviously my kids don’t give a crap about beer, and they sighed in frustration when I mentioned that we were going. And then another even longer sigh when I said we had to walk half an hour to get there. And the same to get back.
The beer museum was great, though! It’s Japan’s oldest brewery, so it’s a lovely heritage building. The kids reluctantly enjoyed themselves when we got to the beer tasting room, as they got to order their own non-beer drinks and cheese samples.
Our final night in Sapporo was uneventful – we hung out in our room trying to reorganize our luggage to fit all the things we’d bought.
The next morning, we rode the train to New Chitose Airport. We were impressed with how kid-friendly the airport is. There’s a whole floor devoted to kids, called Smile Road (3F in Departures Area).
Smile Road has a Hello Kitty check-in counter, Royce Chocolate World (where you can watch them making chocolates through a window), a toddler play area, Daisy Workshop, Doraemon Library, fun photo stations, toy shops, and soft serve ice cream, and more. Here’s a whole post dedicated to things to do at the Sapporo airport with kids.
Our kids are past the age of caring about most of those things, but for any visitors to Hokkaido with toddlers, this would be a godsend!
One Small Regret about Our Trip
I’m not big on regretting anything in life, but if I ever went back to Hokkaido again, I would go in summer (July August).
We had personal reasons for going in June (we needed to be back to Canada before summer started). I also figured that by going in June, we could avoid the summer crowds, and I felt like I didn’t care so much that we would miss the flowers.
However, once we visited, and were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of some flowers just started to bloom, I feel like we missed out on what would most likely be an incredible spectacle.
It would be crazy crowded, as many Japanese and foreign visitors alike flock to Hokkaido for its cooler weather and flower viewing in summer, but I’d still take the crowds if it meant finer weather and a chance to see the flowers in full bloom.
And weather is the other main thing – It was cloudy and rainy for almost our entire Hokkaido trip. Maybe we were just unlucky, or maybe June weather always kind of sucks in Hokkaido.
Hokkaido is known for having gorgeous summer weather, and I think that would have made our trip overall a lot better.
We also would have had a far better experience at Asahi-dake if there hadn’t been much snow and fog. But what’s done is done, and we truly enjoyed the trip nonetheless!