Dipping into the archives, here are some photos from almost exactly two years ago, near where the city butts up against Mt. Daimonji, where developed land ends and one of the paths up to Daimonji starts.

Still in the city part, at this time of year you get some nice colors...

The distinctively-maintained shrubs in front of the house appeared on my blog once before, here, and some of the photos on this Kyoto Fall-Color Preview from last year were taken in this immediate vicinity, as were some on this different Kyoto Fall-Color Preview.

Continuing on toward the mountain, once the houses stop, it's an odd area for a while that feels a bit “no man's land”, before becoming a normal mountain hiking path. Here's what you see upon leaving the “city” part...

The literal translation of the sign is “Let's all cease (being) women walking alone.” This “Let's all cease...” construction is quite common, such as “Let's all cease littering”, and often amuses me. It (the literal translation) is particularly amusing for me here because it's quite inclusive in a way biology does not allow for. Of course, the problem/amusement here is the translation, not the Japanese itself. English, too, has all kinds of idioms that are pretty silly when dissected.

The immediate area after the city ends has a small temple of some sort, and a few other random buildings, all in various states of ill repair....

Somewhere along the line, you see this quaint hand-painted sign...

If you take the path that dives into the mountain, it'll bring you to the top of Mt. Daimonji, from which you can then take a path back down a bit to the Daimonij Fire Pits. The fire pids are just 400 meters from here, but that's as the crow flys. Hiking, it'll take about an hour.

I was on my scooter On this particular outing, just checking out the fall colors. Turning around and returning, once leaving the treecover you're greeted with a nice view of the city, and that pretty house...

Two weeks ago I posted about stopping by the grounds of Kyoto's old imperial palace to check out its fall foliage, which at the time was still pretty minimal. While there, I noticed something interesting about the little entrance gate that I happened to have used (perhaps the smallest of the nine that dot the perimeter of the park)....

It's a tiny, insignificant gate that one doesn't even really notice, but I happened to have parked my scooter next to it, and while getting ready to depart, I noticed what appears to be a repair in one of the large support columns (the one nearest my scooter in the shot above).

From the side...

I don't know for sure anything about it, but I suspect it's a repair, replacing the lower portion of the support (perhaps after it rotted away over time). The black square in the middle is where a piece of wood was shoved a bit too far in, but nevertheless it effectively locks the new lower part into the old upper part. The upper part ends just at the bottom of the “V” of the lower boot, so from the front the seam is covered by the boot and you don't see any evidence of repair...

Again, this is all supposition on my part, but I thought it was cool. I guess I'm geeky that way. I've recently done two other posts about interesting woodworking, one a wooden gear in Japan and another 1800s building techniques in America.

As for wooden gates, the one in today's post is tiny, and much larger and imposing ones are found all over, including in previous posts in my blog at least here, here, here, and here.

Zak invited us to join him and his family for some fun at the BørneLund here in Kyoto. It's a combination kids play area and toy store that we'd been to a few times, but until today, only for its store. (It's where Anthony picked out his birthday present when he turned four.)

It was much more fun than I would have expected.

BørneLund is a Japanese company whose primary business is the import of expensive toys, mostly from Europe. Their name looks like a Swedish name that apparently means “nickel and dime you to death”. Their shop has a very small play zone for kids that costs 600 yen/hour for the kid, 200 yen/hour for the non-optional adult, and (if you don't want to carry your stuff around) coin lockers for 100 or 200 yen. You can, surprisingly, use the bathroom for free.

But it turned out to be quite worth it, especially when he could enjoy it with four-year-old friend Gen. They had a great time.

It's amazing how much they packed into a small location. The “room-of-balls” was the largest I'd ever seen...

There was much roughhousing, which eventually turned into a snowball fight....

Apparently not knowing I was not an enemy, their ball-throwing aggregation turned toward me in the form of a “aim for the camera” game...

I, er, would have thought that my big 24-70mm f/2.8 lens (with lens hood) would have afforded me more protection from the barrage than it did. Ouch.

There was a huge version of the “Tractor Treader” blow-up gerbil wheel that he played with at my folks' place, and he and Gen enjoyed it often...

Then there was the Bounce Room of Yellow, which opened the post...

There were also occasional postings of good, common-sense advice...

There was a whole “grocery store” setup, with plastic food and a big cash register...

I sent Zak a few of my photos with his family in them, and he posted some of them on his blog.

I have another 50 photos from the hour we spent there that I'd like to post. Sigh, I still have a ton of fun photos to post from the last time these two went to a play zone together, the City of Otsu's “Yumekko” Play Land nine months ago. I seem to produce photos I want to post at about 100× faster than I can post them. Maybe I need to raise my posting standards to cut down on the backlog....

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.

Continuing with more from my Visit to Kibune two weeks ago with Thomas Hertel, after we had dango at the restaurant with the old wooden gear, we were walking along the road and were beckoned by the tranquil sight of a tranquil site...

The photo above almost makes it look like some kind of miniature site, but the gate at left is plenty tall enough to walk under, and the bridge itself is about ten feet long.

Thomas posed for a picture, strictly as a size comparison...

If Thomas were to turn to the camera's left, he'd be looking up a set of steep steps running up to the Kibune Shrine....

I liked the many layers in that shot, so tried a tighter zoom...

I'm not sure it's anything more than clutter, but there it is.

Anthony sometimes likes to use my camera, and I like to encourage an interest in something creative, so we posed for a couple of shots. It's pretty funny to see him use my big camera, but he does pretty well...

And with that you can see why it's best for me to be behind the camera rather than in front of it.

The view from halfway up the steps, looking back, was also nice...

At the top was an ornate shrine building that we really didn't pay much attention to because it was getting late and dark. You can see a bit of it here, though...

On the opposite side from the stairs seen above was another much longer set going back down, seen from below in one of the earlier posts in this series. I'm sure that this is supposed to be the main entrance, but we didn't happen to use it.

Here's the view from the top...

It's surprising to me that in all my visits to this area – see any of the “nearby photos” links for more posts from Kibune – this was the first time I'd ventured up to the shrine. I'm sure that this grand staircase is all lit up during the big Kibune Lightup fall-foliage event that I mentioned in the post about the Fall--Foliage Tunnel the other day. My cold is starting to get better, so perhaps I'll be able to run up three some evening to check it out.