Today is the middle of a three-day weekend, one that happens to fall just as the fall colors are really getting going, so Kyoto was absolutely packed to the gills with tourists. Fumie and I both felt much better from our colds today, so we decided to take the opportunity to get out of town.

We went for a drive in the same general direction as we did with Fumie's folks three weeks ago, into the mountains to the northwest of Kyoto. This time we had a specific destination, the Hiyoshi Dam (which, in case you've never heard of it, is a dam), and we took a lovely route of pleasantly-windy mountain roads that we'd not taken before. (For those who know Kyoto: get onto Senbondori and just keep heading north.)

The primary advantage of this route is that it totally bypassed Arashiyama, an area of Kyoto steeped in exquisite beauty (explore the many thumbnails on this page for posts I've written about Arashiyama), a beauty surpassed in magnitude only by the number of tourists this time of year.

Once we got out of the city, it wasn't long before we were in the middle of nowhere. Still, there was a lot of traffic...

The road seen in the photo above is luxuriously wide compared to most we took today. Generally, they were quite narrow and winding, sometimes a very-thin one-lane-only road for long distances. It made for the occasional “interesting time” when you came across someone coming from the opposite direction and no wide spot presented itself.

But here it was wide enough that we could safely pull over, and it was pretty, so we took the opportunity to do so.

It's Fumie's brother's birthday today, so we made a short “happy birthday” greeting video on Fumie's phone and sent it to him...

While Fumie took care of the technical details of sending the video, I wandered around with the camera. It was only a bit after three in the afternoon, but the sun was just about to dip below the mountains, so some areas were brightly lit while others were in relatively deep shade....

We eventually got going and headed deeper into the mountains. I paused at one point to snap a shot that shows what much of the mountainous area in Japan looks like:

There were plenty of colorful trees everywhere, but the ones that stood alone among their green compatriots seemed more stunning. It was getting pretty dark down in the ravine that the road transversed, but one tree could brighten things up....

In the shot above, Anthony is inspecting the carpet of moss by the side of the road for, well, whatever little boys look for. I found a leaf....

The leaves still on the branches, above a stream far below, were wonderful, I thought.

It was here that Anthony, as six-year-old boys are apt to do, decided to just start jumping. Mommy joined him, and that's the shot that leads this post.

But, it was time to hit the road if we wanted to reach the dam before sunset...

And we did... just barely.

Down below, in the area that would become a raging torrent of death and destruction should the dam ever break, there was a park that Anthony could run around in and explore...

It was getting quite dark (darker than these ISO-6400 photos indicate), so I was hesitant to let him get too adventurous. Climbing around on some similar rocks two weeks ago when it was well lit, he slipped and soaked his shoe, so in the enveloping darkness, we opted for other play..... running.

There's just something about a little boy running like that. Wow. It's the way it should be.

It reminds me of one of my favorite shots, Anthony running at Nanzenji (although there are plenty of other shots on that post that are right up there, such as this one).

He ran down and across this huge empty field, to a stage that looked comically small sitting all alone at the bottom end of the field. I suppose it's perfect for summertime “concerts in the park” events, but for Anthony, it was just another place to run...

The view he had on stage facing as he was, was the imposing face of the dam, lit up with decidedly orange incandescent lights, which made for quite a pretty setting against the deep blue of twilight....

It turns out that adjacent to this park is a “refresh plaza” with an onsen (hot-spring bath), so we had a hot bath and dinner before heading home.