Yumen Kanko Hotel Yume-no-sato

The rooms are roomy and the people are friendly. We had a great pufferfish dinner, and I really liked being able to rent a private indoor/outdoor (Roten) bath room. You can soak with your family under the open sky and have some privacy. It's an old-fashioned place with a lot of charm, though the building and rooms show their age. There's no elevator.

A reasonably priced, pleasant local hotel with a hot spring.

The building may be older, but it's kept in very good shape, and the staff were really friendly. We came on the Fukukani Kaiseki plan, and every dish was excellent. Apparently, the head chef received the Yellow Ribbon Medal. I'd be happy to stay again.

I kept going back to the bath, three times in all: before dinner, before bed, and again when I got up. The alkaline simple spring is said to have one of the highest radium concentrations in Western Japan, and my skin felt smoother after soaking. With a bit of luck on the timing, I had the relaxing bath to myself. There isn't an open-air bath, but the large public bath looks over a Japanese garden. The staff gave me a bath towel, face towel, and toothbrush on arrival, and there were plenty of other bath amenities, so packing light was easy. Dinner was a kaiseki spread with lots of Yamaguchi's specialty, fugu. We had fugu sashimi and tempura, plus rice cooked with fugu and wild vegetables from raw rice. The yuzu liqueur aperitif went down so easily that I wanted to take some home. My partner booked the anniversary plan for my birthday month, which came with a glass of wine and Yumeno-onsen bath salts. This was day one of our Yamaguchi trip, and we stayed at Yumeno-sato, a sightseeing hotel in Yumeno-kan, Nagato City. It turned out to be a pretty good tourist hotel.