Old Road from Kyoto to Tokyo

The following day we were so pleased when we woke up to no rain (and the news of Alex's wallet). We had a delicious breakfast of french toast and toasted mochi topped with butter, sugar and roasted soybean powder. I stuffed myself with those mochi. We packed up our stuff to go hiking and set out.
Here's Sean all ready to go:
First stop was the area of town where the central bus station was located. We found some lunch items while Alex grabbed his wallet and then reconvened to catch our train. Alex had bought this loaf of bread with sweet bean that was still warm from the oven--so yummy. I think it amused the Japanese on the train that we were stuffing our faces with treats, in typical American fashion.
Sean, waiting for the train

After we got off the train, we transferred to a bus, which took us on a beautiful drive up to the start of our hike.


There was a small, attractive town at this section of the old road and we browsed some of their stores quickly before setting out.
Juni looked ready to transport her harvest over the mountains in this traditional hat:

Sean was always a big hit with the Japanese ladies:

This hike was one of the hightlights of our trip. The views were so gorgeous the whole way.

Mother nature decided to put a little damper on things (pun intended). Some of us came prepared with rain coats, others didn't. It was coming down pretty hard though, so rain gear or no, we all got pretty wet. We tried standing under trees for protection, but that wasn't effective. Eventually we found a wooden rest stop that had shelter. Juni stripped out of her soaked clothes and put on one of Sean's spare onesies. It was hilarious.




We had fun hanging out for a while and eventually the rain passed. We were so glad we got to continue our hike rather than catching a bus back. Luckily the rain stayed away for the rest of our 7 mile journey.
We visited some waterfalls along the way, and went through beautiful old towns and rice paddies.


Jeremy decided to get a real cultural experience working in the paddies.


We loved this old town we walked through


And we loved Mr Toad here:

Here I go again with the rice paddies. I just thought they were beautiful. Not long after I took this picture, Juniper fell in the water when she was trying to see a salamander. Unfortunately we were down to the last spare onesie.

When we arrived at our destination we found that the last bus had already come and gone so we called taxis to get back to the train station. We had an interesting time on the train--fun times, scary times. Juniper was following her auntie Lizzy's example swinging on the handles and having a blast.

On the scary side, a drunk guy got on the train and as Juniper was walking by he grabbed her to sit in his lap. Obviously, she was terrified and so were we. That was just not okay. Jeremy had to jump across the aisle to pull her away from him. She was fairly somber the rest of the ride. And we were highly disturbed by the way he was staring at all of the kids. Alex tried to distract him by talking with him, which helped somewhat. We were all relieved when he got off the train.

When we arrived back in Nagoya we stopped off at a Ramen House for some hot, delicious noodles. Afterwards we walked back, home full of noodles and some great memories from that day.