Izu Coastline

The trip home was plagued with rain but the advantage was it kept the tourists home. We had a delightful trip following the coastline and viewing some of the spectacular scenery.

Izu Peninsula

Jeff decided that Gabby, our navie system, needed an outing so we took off for a long weekend on the Izu Peninsula. It’s one of the hot spots to travel to here in Japan and particularly popular with the folks in Tokyo because it is so close. We learned, through a prolonged, attempted, sightseeing excursion one afternoon, that the eastern side of the peninsula is actually one large parking lot. Fortunately, there is an inland route to get to the tip and we used it on the way down. There is even a spiral bridge on the road…we made 2 complete revolutions coming down the bridge…just like in a parking lot but free-standing in the middle of nowhere!!!
Except for our rather dull crawl up the coast (we gave up after 2 hours-took us a while to figure out it was pointless), we spent most of our time in Shimoda.
History alert!!! This city/port is the location where the American Black Ship, (Kurofune in Japanese), entered in the 19th century. Prior to this there was a national isolation policy which had preserved Japanese heritage by making any exchange with foreign countries illegal. Whew! end of lesson.
The port and the surrounding areas are gorgeous. We spent most of the morning hiking between Shimoda lighthouse, Tsumekizaki and Sazaki, a neighboring fishing village with its own, smaller lighthouse. It was our only sunny day and the view and scenery was spectacular.
Later, we took the ropeway up to the top of the hill that overlooks the port where the Black Ship entered. They have a lot of information about that first contact. It’s interesting…we’ve been told that school books here portray Perry with a slightly wild look to him….

Home delivery

We came upon this truck, unloading large machinery, on our way out of our ryokan. The road is quite wide at this point, but he's using the whole thing. We had never seen a truck up in the air like this. The man was very quick as he switched two machines, bowing to us as he raced from one to the other. When he finally brought the truck back down to a more normal setting he bowed once more and then quickly moved the truck.

Those wide streets

Here's a picture of our car coming up a two-way street! (it's actually the road to the ryokan as well as a number of homes) Obviously, you’ve got to wait your turn. THEY race up and down it…we crawled. To top it off, it’s roughly a 110 degree turn into this road.

Unique Signage

There are some things that are just very different here in Japan. One is the stray road sign you might just encounter.....