Continuing from Part 1 and Part 2 about our visit to Kyoto's Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社).....

A short climb from the pretty lake mentioned in Part 1, you come, surprisingly, across a couple of small buildings, one a restaurant, straddling the path:

We stopped for a juice, and to chat with the lady. She was 86, and the fourth generation of her family to own/run the little restaurant. The shrine owns the land, but for whatever reason, the family has these buildings. The building across the path was her house; she had been born there.

I found out later, from [...]

Here are a few more pics from the early part of my visit to Kyoto's Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) with Anthony yesterday....

I tend to take pictures of them whenever I see them (all the time), so I'm surprised that they've appeared on my blog only three times in the past, in posts about Arashiyama, Giouji Temple, and Konpukuji Temple (update: and Miyajima).

Part of yesterday's Elaborate Sub-Shrine facing the pretty lake....

I really liked the rack of gate offerings, as (I think) they made for some great imagery.

The real gates weren't so bad themselves, of course; with paths [...]

Wow.

Wow wow wow.

I've lived in this part of the world for the better half of the last 20 years, but today was my first visit to the Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) in south-east Kyoto, and it was amazing.

I'd heard enough about it to know that it had a path lined with a bunch of torii gates, but I was totally unprepared for the thousands and thousands of gates lining miles of mountain paths.

And frankly, that wasn't even the best part, but it was such a visually-overwhelming experience for someone with an eye toward photography that I [...]

Day 4 of my camping trip with Anthony to Kotobikihama beach (northern Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) was a day full of sun and sand, marred only by a few minutes of wind-driven terror (or, at least, wide-eyed surprise, as my tent almost got blown away).

The night was pleasantly warm, as opposed to the freeze-your-toes-off cold that it had been on previous nights, so that was welcome. Unfortunately, along with the warmth came a howling wind that buffeted the tent in loud gusts that were jarring both mentally and physically. I spent from about 1:30am to 3:00am trying to make sure [...]

On the way home from the park the other day, Anthony and I stopped by the Hotel Okura to pick up a birthday cake for Fumie's mom. Kyoto's Hotel Okura has a first-floor restaurant with excellent (although extremely expensive) food and cake that's part of our Christmas-Eve Tradition.

Not wanting to leave my camera outside in my bicycle basket, I had it with me, and couldn't help but take a picture of the lovely puffy flowers in the lobby. They're all fairly long hand-held exposures, but seem to have turned out okay.