Early morning & we left the hotel for Kinetsu Kyoto station.....destination...Toba Station and Mikimoto Pearl Island.  On the train.  Amy, our wonderful guide for the second half of our journey looks as if she's wearing a Mickey Mouse hat! We have...

Adjacent to Shirakawa Dori Street.....through the old wooden houses, lined back streets & alleyways of Kyoto's famous geisha districts and you can see geiko or maiko ( Geisha's and Geisha 'apprentices') walking along in full dress, hair and makeup. (Sorry, my...

..........This incredible street is next to the Shirawaka Canal.  During the day or in the evening you're transported to a dream world.  Throngs of people celebrating and photographing the Cherry trees do not deminish the experience.  It's as if you're...

lWe arrived at the elegant & spacious home of Mrs. Masako Konishi, a llovely woman who welcomed us in the most gracious manner. Some of the stone pieces in the garden were from the Edo Period and her family dates back some 800 years in Koyoto. Shoes off...

Onto the tour bus for a hour and a half ride to Kurotani Village in the city of Ayabe.  Along the way we saw such beauty in the mountains, miles of huge pine trees.....the  forrest interspersed with Cherry trees (of course!) and white Magnolias.  The...

......It's Pam's birthday and that made it a very special day starting with seeing Toyonshima, the 'shortest' of the current sumo wrestlers.  He's in the top 3 and thanks to Pam's friend we learned how much fun it is to see a small guy defeat a giant by skill...

.....Wabi Sabi is a distinctly Japanese ideal. It's the world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transcence and imperfection.  Beauty that is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.  The characteristics of Wabi Sabi include asymmetry, roughness...

....and Sakae 'Eva' Yagino, our wonderful guide who we all fell in love with.  She is so knowledgeable and poured so much information into us that I'm sure some spilled out along the way. In the background is one of the touring ships that we could see from the...

I've long heard tales of the Japanese country 'inns' but this was way beyond my wildest dreams and I found it absolutely sublime! All of our rooms overlooked the lake with majestic cedar trees and awesome Mt. Fuji appearing just as in all the woodblock prints we've...