Trip Pictures

Alright, here is the long awaited post with trip pictures.  I assume I won't get through all of them in one post because there are a ton. These are all pictures from Mie's phone. I actually have more pictures on my camera (thanks, Dan!) but I can't actually upload them directly to my Mac because it seems totally reasonable for a digital camera to have that problem nowadays (???).  Anyway, I will probably upload them to my work computer and then move them or some such thing.  Ok, here goes.

Here's a picture of me drinking some Green Dakara (warning: unbelievably cute commercial).  It looks like the road is slanting up because it is. This is Daisen (literally "big mountain"), one of the biggest mountains in western Japan, not too far from where we were. It's good for skiing in the winter and climbing in the summer.

And some more pictures of Daisen.  Sorry they are mostly of me, but, again Mie's phone.  It was a nice day, and we intended to go the shrine which is only part of the way up the mountain since my previous experiences at Daisen were all either skiing or beer drinking, but since it wasn't very far, we decided to go a little bit farther up the mountain before turning around.  Unfortunately, it turns out the path doesn't meet up with another path until most of the way up the mountain, which meant that we ended up climbing the mountain unintentionally.




That gate there is the entrance to the shrine, and that thing spitting out water is, well, a thing spitting out water.  It is for washing your hands before entering the shrine proper.  You can sort of make out on the sign, which was where our path finally crossed with another one.  To the left is the way to the top, 1.2 km up, to the right, the way down, 1.6 km, and you can barely see it, but the way we came was 2.3 km, I think. This was all done in just sneakers because we hadn't planned on actually climbing the mountain. There were tons of people going up and down the mountain with all their gear, which was kind of hilarious.  It's not like you can't do it without gear, though. There's no scaling a rock face or anything, just kind of hiking uphill.

Since blogger is weird with pictures, I think I will split this into multiple posts.