Fall leaves at Mitaki-dera

Reid here.

Yesterday, I went to Mitaki Mtn. I had heard that there were a lot of pretty leaves there, but I didn't see very much at all. I was trying to go to Mitaki-dera, but ended up at Mitaki Nature Park. Not surprising as I'm not good with directions, and when those directions are in a foreign language, I'm even worse.  Anyway, my dear wife is NOT bad with directions... even in Japanese. So today after church service, we walked to the correct Mitaki location. Here are some of the pictures.

The deep red maples were beautiful.

A fountain for ceremonial washing.

One of the waterfalls. Mitaki means "3 waterfalls".

Another waterfall

Tea house 

Selfie of Novelynn and Jack.

Interesting tree. Just to the right of the large rock holding up the strangely shaped, near-horizontal trunk is a fairly thin, vertical trunk. I'm pretty sure that's the main source of nutrients ( i.e. a trunk) for this maple.

The trunk of a great big cedar tree. I really like the texture of this.

The Commerce Festival

There was a festival celebrating commerce right down the street from us. It was mostly food (or at least some things that people can eat). Here are some "fish sticks."

   Jack brought Mabel Monkey, and this is some of what we saw, like the "fish of commerce"(??).

And here is a good luck rake that people buy in hopes of raking in the money.

We ended up staying out later than we should've, but maybe the kids will live over it.