I still haven't gone through all my photos from yesterday's trip to the garden at Kyoto's Eikando Temple, but I wanted to show a few more, so here are some from the middle of the batch. Like yesterday's most of these are best appreciated with a large, wide-gamut monitor.

Continued here...

I visited today the Eikando Temple gardens, nestled in the base of the mountains at the far east of Kyoto, about a 15-minute walk from our place. I'd been there before and thought it was really pretty, but I must have been stupid or blind (or on parenting duty with an impatient kid to look after) because today it was FREAKING MIND-BLOWING AMAZING.

Just *WOW*.

My photos don't even come close to doing it justice.

The temple is famous for its fall colors, as I found out the first time I drove by during the proper season, posted in "Colorful [...]

The large rusty white sign above says "this is a national treasure; don't play inside" and the small one on the stone lantern says "don't touch" Yoshida shrine complex is full of signs with all manner of these kind of admonishments.... somewhat of a bummer.

So, on my short outing on Sunday morning to explore Mt. Yoshida, where I ended up finding the Yoshida Shrine nestled in the mountain, I had started at an ancillary shrine accessible by a small twisty road toward the south edge of the mountain, desirable as a starting spot due to its compelling attributes of [...]

While Anthony was at his swimming lesson last Sunday morning, I decided to kill the hour by scooting the kilometer over to Mt. Yoshida and poke around.

I "discovered" Mt. Yoshida when Stéphane Barbery (he of my earlier Jidai Matsuri festival photos and the wilting flower posts) introduced me to it back in April. At that time I got to visit only one small part; this time I wanted to visit the major shrine I knew to be there.... somewhere. Mt. Yoshida is a relatively small outcropping in the middle of town – about 35 acres, half the area of [...]

Having felt cooped up in the house for the last week, we took an impromptu drive into the mountains north of Kyoto yesterday, stopping by a bakery on the way to pick up a snack. Not long after entering the mountains, we stopped off the road to eat at a location that happened to be near the Hakuryuuen Garden, which I posted about in some detail a couple of months ago.

As before, it was closed off with a fence across the entrance, right at the road shoulder....

But if you took care when buses passed, you could walk up [...]