vacation Friday1: Tori gates

Today's plan was to do some more tourist things around Kyoto and than train over to Okayama.

We started with the Tori gates, which is actually called Fushimi Inari.  These were so cool.  I love the red-orange color the gates were painted and there were so many of them.  Somewhere I read that they were painted a vermilion color, but personally I think it had more orange in it than vermilion does.

A gate where we were dropped off, waiting for the rest of the group.  They went to a different entrance, which was confusing.  But the day was nice...warm but not too warm.  Grey skies threatening rain but not actually raining.

Joshua wanted a picture with this and since he doesn't ask often it even gets included here.

They had some nice pebble-stay-in-place things.  Not really picture worthy, but I have two kids that like rocks and we talked about the rocks more than I expect most people do.  The stay-in-place things were not comfortable to walk on.  I kind of want to make this a big picture for Isaac.

There were a lot of pictures to be taken.  It was so pretty.  Although it's a bit hard to see in the pictures I select on the way up the mountain all the gates had the same two words on them: accept on the left and serve on the right.

On the other side of all the gates was the sponsor (left side) and the auspicious day that it was erected (right side).

Around this time Joshua just took my phone and started taking pictures.  He had some cool ones.  He was looking around and enjoying himself, so he could take as many as he wanted.

The gates come in all sizes.

Do you see all my umbrellas?  I grabbed my purse strap and then they were easy to carry.

So there is a first section, a second section, and then you can choose to hike around the whole thing for an additional forty minutes.  While I'm sure it would have been a nice hike, everyone decided it wasn't our best choice.  Furthermore, we didn't want to be caught on the mountain if it started raining.

I really like this picture.  I think someone fell right as it was being taken and so we're all looking that way.  (They were fine.)

Not only was it a forest, it was a bamboo forest!  Isaac tried to grow some bamboo and was unsuccessful, but he's still intrigued by it.

When we got to the bottom, there were some musicians that were warming up as though they were actually going to do something.  One of the instruments was the koto.  They tuned up, played for about thirty seconds, and then waited for a long time.  It was part of a ceremony going on in the temple behind us, which we didn't realize at the time.  Anyway.  The stipulation of Isaac not marching at Tulip Time was that he keep his ear out for Japanese music.  There were a few other places we heard some, but I was hoping this would be a place with a slightly longer song. (image credit)

Near the end of our walk down the mountain, Isaac slipped and got his ankle.  We were all worried about it for a while, but after a minute or so he said it was fine.  (Spoiler: it was).  Well, then after the music he started complaining that his feet were hurting.  I tried to have him keep going, but he kept complaining.  We finally found a place to sit while Travis and Scarlet got some food and we got some juice.  Joshua was a bit bored during this time, so he asked if he could go shopping.  I said that was fine, so he just went in a few of the small stores nearby until he found the perfect lucky cat that he had been looking for.  It wasn't too big and the hand moved.  After I went with him to see it, I gave him some money and he purchased it...no big deal.  And it really isn't, but it also isn't something that he does on his own very often.

Oh, this is turning out to be a really long post and we're only at ~10:30am.  I think I'll split it into two.