Lake Towada and Hachinohe Beach

We finally tracked down some local maps... The book store here is consistently out of English atlases of Japan. They always have plenty of US atlases, of course, just nothing that would be helpful for us here. But we got some travel brochures in English and decided to venture out to see Lake Towada on Saturday and Hachinohe beach on Sunday.

This is a fairly typical scene here once you get a few minutes outside of the town. The roads were MUCH narrower though as we started getting into the mountains.

Beautiful Lake Towada.

These shrines are literally everywhere... But this is my favorite one so far. Just up the hill from the lake, very peaceful and secluded.

On the way home - this is just one example of some of the bizarre ways they prune their trees and shrubs around here.

The beautiful Pacific.

Huck's first view of the ocean.

He had no idea it was going to come back at him. He's still trying to figure that one out.

Oh the joy of running on a beach...

Huck follows Chris everywhere... no matter how steep, he refuses to be left behind.

He's always ready to play.

Weekend successes: We didn't get lost. We can now recognize the Kanji symbols for Towada and Hachinohe. We didn't scrape a guardrail or hit another car while driving on the impossibly narrow roads. When ordering ice cream or donuts from road side stands, we asked how much they cost (in Japanese) then understood the response just enough to pay the correct amount. It was a great weekend :-).