Kawazu

Last Sunday Stephanie and I traveled to the Izu Peninsula to see the town of Kawazu, where they have planted a special variety of early blossoming cherry trees!  It was beautiful!  I got a little carried away taking pictures.

We traveled to Kawazu on the Odoriko Super View Express.  It was a pretty cool train with huge windows!  The first and last cars were two levels, and the bottom level of the first car was a kid's playroom.  Pretty nice!

The view from the train was nice as we traveled along the coast.

 Here is our train - I wasn't the only one excited enough about it to take pictures!  I have become a little obsessed with trains lately.

 There were cute signs all over the town - I think this one says "everyone be happy". (?)

 There were some para-gliders over the town - I bet the sakura looked amazing from up there!

 The cherry blossom festival of the town was in full swing, and there were many people there.  In addition to the sakura there were other flowers blooming as well!

 Closeup!

 A festival means lots of food stands and snacks.  I got some grilled mushrooms.  And as usual, I ate one before I remembered to take a picture!

 So many foods!  A lot of them were pink and cherry flavored.

Chiizu!

 More foods - a roasted sweet potato cut into wedges and rolled in sugar.  I couldn't finish it!

 Most of the trees were planted along a river, it made for a beautiful walk.

 At times the trees created a tunnel to walk under.

 So very Japanese!

 A nice man offered to take our picture!  I was amazed that there wasn't anyone behind us since it was so crowded there.  Also, it appears that we dressed to match with the blossoms.

We just missed the eruption of this geyser.  I think it's fake though, because it went off every hour on the half hour exactly according to the schedule!

The daffodils and the sakura together were so pretty!

 After strolling in the town for a while we decided to take the bus to see some waterfalls.  On the way we passed this spiral bridge.  I wish we would have gone up it, but we went around instead.  It looked so cool!

 Kawazu has 7 waterfalls, but the paths to get to some of them were under construction.  It looks like there were some small landslides that took out some of the paths.

 The ones we did get to see were pretty impressive!

 I tried my hand at throwing some wishing stones into a bowl made out of a rock in the middle of the river.  I missed badly!

 This was the best waterfall of the bunch, and a great view to end our day.

After seeing the waterfalls the weather started to change, getting cooler and starting to rain.  Back in the town we had some dinner, and then boarded a very crowded train back to Yokohama.  We had to stand the whole way back, but we were entertained by what appeared to be a mother and daughter standing near us and drinking a lot of beer and eating a seemingly never ending supply of snacks. They, in turn, were amused by us, studying Kanji by writing them on the foggy window!