As I wrote in yesterday's post about the doggy funeral, we had lunch at a great cafe. In the southern part of Shiga Prefecture, perhaps an hour's drive from Kyoto, is a private business called Sunainosato (寿長生の郷), which consists of a restaurant, a cafe, and a confectionery, all on 50 acres of wonderfully wooded land in the countryside.

The grounds are open as if it were a public park, and they're very nice.

The little drop-off shelter near the parking lot illustrates the simple, understated class of the entire site.

From there, one enters a small orchard that has more [...]

Fumie's folks' dog, Huck, died last month, aged exactly 17 years 8 months, which made him one very old puppy. I think Fumie had just started high school when he joined their family.

He'd been in poor health for a long time, since prior to me getting any kind of photographic skill, so the best photo I could find was a blurry crop from an old snapshot.

I'm not sure what people normally do in Japan when a pet dies and they don't have a yard to bury him in (come to think of it, I don't know what people [...]

On the first day of our mini late-April trip to Awaji Island a few hours' drive south of Kyoto, we saw the sunset from a beach on the south-west part of the island, as I posted the following day.

I had my recently-acquired Sigma "Bigma" 50-500mm superzoom, and had fun playing with its long reach.

Most beaches I've seen in Japan are full of trash, either left behind by a throng of uncaring visitors, or blown in from the ocean over the years and left to collect. This one was much better than most -- perhaps a local association cleans [...]

Yesterday was our twelfth wedding anniversary, so I took Fumie out for lunch.

I'd planned to take her to a particular restaurant I knew, until at almost the last moment I realized that they were closed (doh!), so I had to scramble for a new idea. I checked my go-to resource for restaurant info (Deep Kyoto's post archives) and quickly found one that looked perfect, a review of a cafe named "Quarirengué". I have no idea how to pronounce it, but it looked nice.

They're mostly open for cakes and coffee, but we were hungry so partook of the two [...]

The hotel that I recently wrote about (at which we stayed during our recent mini trip to Awaji Island a couple of hours south of Kyoto), Westin Awaji Island, is part of a conference center and park called the "Awaji Yumebutai" (淡路夢舞台;, "Stage of Dreams", English home page), a complex array of buildings and visuallly-interesting areas built on the side of a mountain that had been half taken away in the early 90s for use as sea-fill during construction of the man-made islands that are now Kansai International Airport.

One of the "visually-interesting areas" is known as the "100-level garden" [...]