Kyoto: Fushimi Inari Shrine

For his birthday this year I decided to do something I knew Dan would like.  I told him we could sign up for the 2 day Kyoto trip, just us- no kids.  I found a marvelous friend who would come stay with the kids, and cleaned up the house so she wouldn't know I am as much of a slob as I really am, and I  got things together so we could go.

We left at 7am Saturday morning and sat on the bus for 6 hours.  Yippee.  Our first stop was the Fushimi Inari Shrine.  I love the Inari shrines!  I love the thousand torii gates; I think they are so fantastic!  This one was quite crowded.  Apparently it is the Head Shrine of more than 40,000 Inari shrines in Japan and is one of the oldest shrines in Kyoto. It enshrines the god of good business, so folks who want good business fortune come here. Oh, and if you have ever seen the movie "Memory of a Geisha", parts of that were filmed at this shrine.  It was pretty cool, even if it was crowded.

One of the rest stops had a bakery and I tried some things.  This was not a winner.  There was corn hiding in my bun!

There were some odd things in the rest stop walking area.  Was this a sculpture?  An exercise structure? A comedic tool?

Sigh.  I just love the architecture!

So pretty!

The beginning of the 1000+ torii gates.

I loved that there were so many ladies in kimonos out that day.

Perplexing, but cool.

My "we were there" picture.

Have I mentioned how much I love Japan and how beautiful it is?!

And this makes my heart go pitter-pat!

We had to stop and wait for these guys to get their photo taken, and we huddled just out of their camera's shot.

I thought this was too cute.

At the end were lots of little shrin-ey things.  Very cool to see.

But with the sun and trees, it made for dreadful lighting for photos of us.

But we tried!