Road Trip: Day 2

After a nice breakfast of toasted English muffins at Nick's, we headed of to our last Akita destination - Lake Towada! It was only a half hour drive so we arrived before all the tour buses and were able to the view for about 10min - then a tour bus from Sendai pulled up! haha, but even with people around the lake and surrounding mountains are gorgeous! We drove partway around, stopping for coffee (water for me!) at a marina cafe, and at the statue of the maidens of the lake. The statue was not very pretty and really not that exciting. What really got me was the shrine for them. It was up a hill, and then you can take an even higher mountain path (which was really stairs) for a good view and another shrine. At the top of this area, there are two sections of iron ladders down the other side to the edge of the lake. You wont understand until you see pictures how high and steep and scary it is. Since it's all that defying death for just a nice view, none of the other girls want
edto go. I went. Going down was freeeeaky! one slip and you'd be splat on the ground below - i held on and didnt slip. :) At the bottom I was all happy to be there, but the climb back up was looooong and tiring. All in all the view wasn't that cool but the scary ladder experience was a blast on its own! :)

Next we continued to Oirase Gorge (I think I'm spelling that wrong), which is a not that amazing river canyon near the lake. The cool thing was how beautiful and full the river was thanks to all the runoff! We went for a walk along the river with hundreds of tourists and took lots of pictures of the pretty waterfalls. We also ran into some older americans - teaches at an American school on the base in Iwate - and they wanted to talk to us forever. weird.

Next we had a long, windy drive over the mountains to Aomori Prefecture. I got a little carsick so I had to close my eyes and miss out on a lot of scenery. :(

We made it to Hirosaki...

Im going to bed, so the rest will have to wait!