Welcome to my blog. I document my adventures in travel, style, and food. Hope you have a nice stay!
Many things happen with the beginning of a new year, among them the Seattle Times' annual Pictures of the Year event at the Seattle Library. We've gone every year, and the event has become quite popular, completely filling the Microsoft Auditorium.
It's been a couple weeks since I finished my 2016 Project 366. That's a long stretch of daily photos, especially since all of them were taken with my main camera (meaning I carried it around daily).
We made our annual trip to the Southern California area. Mochi was made and miles were walked.
December brought cold weather and a bit of travel, which made for good opportunities for photos for the last month of the year. The rest of the month's pictures are on the December page.
We heard an interview with Virginia Wright last week at the Seattle Art Museum. She’s well known in the area for her art philanthropy. The interview was part of KUOW’s Front Row Center series, and Melody is a big fan of Marcie Sillman’s work on the series of events.
Our trip to Japan was half in October, half in November, so it's not surprising that a couple more photos from the trip made it into this month's favorite photos. You can see the rest on the November page. One more month to go.
It's taken me quite a while to put this last post together. Part of it is trying to get back into things here, part wanting for the experience to sink in a bit before reflecting. Instead of a regular blog post, I decided to summarize odds and ends our trip in a series of bullet points, with some final thoughts at the end.
We had two short days on the way to Japan, and we make up for it with a 41-hour day on the way back. We did manage to sneak in an art museum before heading to the airport.
It's come down to this. One more full day in Japan, and about six hours of that going from our Takayama hostel to our Tokyo hotel. We got some great views from the trains, and even managed to get a little sightseeing in.
We're heading into the last stretch of our trip, with this day being the last without travel (we travel to Tokyo the next day, then fly home the day after that). We spent it visiting the old Takayama government building followed by another walking course which went by several temples and shrines. It then went uphill to a park with the ruins of Takayama Castle.
We had two major sights planned for the day. The museum was about a half hour walk to the west of the hostel, and the walking course was about 20 minutes to the east. So we knew we had quite a bit of walking ahead of us, but we were able to break it up into different segments.
After leaving Ainokura, we went to another village with gassho-zukuri houses. And then it was on to Takayama.
After a few days on the west coast of Japan, it was time to head to the mountains. Instead of a hostel or a business hotel, this time we were spending the night in a farmhouse in the mountains.
We spanned the years from the time of the samurai to art from the 21st century. And what some would think is from the far future, Japanese toilets.
For the first of two full days in Kanazawa, we saw one of the Great Gardens of Japan, walked through one of Kanazawa's geisha districts, and tried to finalize the rest of our transportation between cities.
A day of travel and little sightseeing, but we did manage to get from Hiroshima to Kanazawa. What would have been a 7½ our drive took us a little over 6 hours by train. And yes, we hung out at Starbucks for a bit.
Having done a day and a half in Miyajima, it was time to spend some time in Hiroshima. Since our plans were for only one night, we knew we would be doing all of our sightseeing after we arrived in the morning. Everything we went to centered around the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park.
Having already seen a major shrine and a major temple on Miyajima, we decided to go up to the top. We later returned, not only to sea level but below it so we could walk close to the floating torii.
With our last night in Kyoto behind us, the rest of the trip will be more moving from city to city. First up is Miyajima, the island which is the home of the floating torii. We did a few things on the island, then went back by ferry to be foiled by a train crossing.
We had one last full day in Kyoto and decided to not pack it too tightly. We did make it to a castle, a garden, and had some really good tempura for dinner.
