Fumie had a ballet performance this weekend down in Nagaokakyo City, and I had some hours to kill after dropping her off for the pre-performance rehearsal, so I met up with some friends to visit some local sites with the camera.

この間の日曜日、長岡京市の桜を見に行きました。雨と風の間にちょっぴり撮影できました。

The weather was unpleasant (cold, rainy, and windy), but there was a brief respite just as I was arriving.

The little lake between the road and the shrine has a series of boardwalks on it, and it seems that they were all recently rebuilt with bare wood....

I'd think it'd look better with some nice stain, but perhaps they'll let nature do that over time. For reference, here's what it looked like a year and a half ago:

It was cold and the rain was increasing, so didn't spend much time around the actual shrine complex. But for reference, this is the location where I shot “Cute Little Melodrama in Five Photos” a couple of years ago.

We took a couple of hours for a long early lunch to escape the weather, during which the rain mostly stopped, so we headed into the mountains for 15 minutes to check out the Yokokuji Temple (楊谷寺) that we'd seen on the map.

This temple doesn't have a lot of cherry trees, so it wasn't the prime time for its foliage. I suspect it'd be wonderful in the summer and awesome in the fall. But I liked it nevertheless due to its simple authenticity. It exists to serve the locals, and as such is not a tourist destination. In fact, we were the only people there.

There were two paths up the mountain to a sub temple, one of which was a set of covered stairs. We took that path down.

We eventually returned to the cherry blossoms of the first place we were at, and although the rain had stopped, the wind had picked up considerably to frozen gusts that sliced right through you, so I didn't use the camera again, and was happy when I could retreat to the comfort of the concert hall and Fumie's performance in The Nutcracker.