I was out again today for an amazing day of fall-foliage photography, and on the way home in the late afternoon stopped in to the Koutouin Temple (高桐院) for 10 minutes, just to peek at its most-excellent entrance path, which featured prominently in "A First Visit To Kyoto’s Koutou-in Temple" two weeks ago. I have still literally not even looked at the photos from my second trip to this temple, but since I took only a few photos on this trip today, I thought I'd post some.

I was greeted with exactly what I expected.... lots of people...

... and [...]

Today is a national holiday of some sort in Japan, so we took a drive out to the mountains to take some photos for our Christmas and New-Year's cards. We wanted to go somewhere pretty but uncrowded, and since it was a mad house in Kyoto, we headed out to the same area as in my previous post, "Beating the Crowds at the Middle-of-Nowhere Sokushouji Temple". We got our photos, and since we were in the neighborhood, I wanted to show Fumie and Anthony the temple...

The roof near the top of the steps is for a little seating/rest area, [...]

Two weeks ago, in the "Bridges Across a Small Valley in Konan" post about an impromptu far-flung photogenically-inquisitive scooter ride, I noted that the trip had produced some delights to post about. One was an out-of-the-way temple not far from the bridges that I discovered at dusk, but it turns out that I wasn't able to get around to posting about it because I've had a really busy time since, with photographically productive visits to the Kongourinji, Konzou, Koutouin, Eikando, Sanzen'in, and Yoshiminedera Temples.

But despite not having had time to post about it, I went back to visit again [...]

The other day I posted the first photo above as one of my "What am I?" quizzes. The second photo shows the same view, but with a smaller aperture and the focus on the foreground.

Here's the view from the front:

I posed the quiz as being a simple one to anyone familiar with the Internet because all one had to do was click on the "nearby photos" link under the photo (as I have under almost all photos I post) to find out that I had previously blogged a post titled "A Bazillion Offering Statuettes at the Sanzen-in Temple", [...]

I'd gone out to the mountains with Paul Barr today, intending to retrace the steps of last week's temple hopping in the mountains of south-western Kyoto, but we were so consumed by the beauty at the first stop, the Yoshiminedera Temple (about which I still have 500+ photos from last week to sift through) that we didn't do much else.

But still, in the late afternoon on the way home, between episodes of getting soaked in the rain, we did happen upon a small temple that we took a few minutes to explore.

I've got such a backlog of photos [...]