Continued from post here. You can follow the start of our journey here.
After the ice-cream-making class at the Cheese Factory, we headed to the Rokugou Village to visit the Furano Jam Garden and Anpanman Shop. The jam store is actually called “Auntie Jam’s Gift Shop”.
In front of the jam shop is a small playground area with Anpanman horsey characters. Our younger two kids could not wait to ride on them.
Auntie Jam’s Gift Shop allow customers to taste test any of their 35 kinds of hand-made Jam before deciding what they want to purchase. The jams are all homemade and use only natural ingredients. You could also make reservations the day before for a Jam Making Class. There, they teach you their “secret” recipe.
Right next door to the jam shop is the Anpanman museum and toy store. While there are many Anpanman stores throughout Japan, this one is directly operated by Takashi Yanase, who authored Anpanman.
The downstairs of the shop sells various Anpanman toys and merchandise. If you go upstairs, there is a large and spacious art gallery.
There are even art prints signed by Takashi Yanase himself that you can admire and purchase.
Nearby is the Rokugo Viewing Platform, but we chose to skip it as the flowers were not in full bloom at the time.
Our last stop in Furano was the Furano Wine Factory. It is located on a hill overlooking the town, and you could see the slops of the factory covered with lavender blooms.
The winery showcases the production process of their wines. But we headed straight upstairs to the free wine-tasting area. It consisted of two of their red wines, a white wine, and a rose.
You were able to grab a small plastic cup and help yourself to the barrels of wine available and drink to your heart’s content. Also in the back is the cashier where you could purchase wine by the bottle. In there is also grape juice for the kids to sample. The wines were only okay, and can hardly compare to the Napa and Sonoma wines we have in California. We did some bottles of the grape juice for the kids as they really enjoyed it.
With the tour and sampling of the wines completed, Furano was all wrapped up. We then hopped back in our car and headed on the expressway to our next destination of Sapporo.