Takatori-yama Climbing

Looking back, I cannot believe how much we did in a three-day weekend.  It was awesome to explore locally and have such a good time.   On Monday, we drove to Ikego and hiked to Takatori-yama, a rock climbing location we went to last December.  The hike is beautiful.  It starts off through the woods and then up many stone stairs to a small temple.  The temple is serene and beautiful with the tori gate, main building, bell structure and Jinz-o statues.  We pressed on.

Since we are expert hikers, we realized that we had taken a wrong turn when we were walking back down the (little) mountain.  Things look a lot different when trees have leaves on them in May vs bare in Dec!  So, we back-tracked and were also helped out by a Japanese guy singing in the forest.  No, he didn't sing the directions to us (that would have been awesome!), but he cut off his singing when he saw our (ok, ok, fine, SMS') giant pack and asked us if we were going to Takatori-yama and then gave us directions.

Bear right at this sign, not left

 We climbed for a couple of hours.  I am very rusty and the rock is kind of difficult for me.  It's basically tightly pressed sand that starts to disintegrate and embed sharp little sand particles into my out-of-practice, non-calloused hands.  Ouch.  I am not the biggest fan of rock climbing hurting so it was a pretty light, get-back--into-it-slowly type of day for me.

Looking good, SMS!

After climbing, we called our friend Melinda and headed out near Enoshima to get breakfast at bills'.  We had heard a lot about it and so had everyone else.  The wait was two hours and even though it looked delicious, we needed food about 5 minutes ago at that point.  Part of that is my fault since we got 10 minutes lost while driving.  So we went to a little pizza place that was very oishii and all was right with the world again.

That night, we went out to dinner with two really good friends from San Diego.  I'm so happy they're both here!  We went out to a little izakaya by their house and had a great time.  I feel so lucky to have great friends here so quickly.  In San Diego, it took me awhile to get settled in and if it took me too long here, it would be time for us to move again!