Kamakura

Tony and I decided to take a tour by ourselves while the kids were at school... so as not to hear all the complaining!  We went to Kamakura which is a coastal city about an hour south of Tokyo - it took us about an hour on the trains.  We first stopped and had lunch, after searching up and down the streets for something that I would eat.  Tony is obviously more adventurous than I when it comes to trying new foods, but I just can't seem to get over eating meat that I am not absolutely sure what it is.  So we finally found a little place, well most places in Japan are little places, that served Australian food.  I, of course had a pizza and Tony had a kangaroo meat sandwich. 

 We decided to go on a hike, they have hiking trails that lead to The Great Buddha.  It was pretty warm that day, and we really didn't take into account the heat or the hike when we were dressing for the day.  Needless to say, we were getting passed left and right by the Japanese people as we hiked up over the mountain.  I had to go to the bathroom so bad that we stepped off the trail to get a little privacy and ended up going the wrong direction for a while before we figured it out and had to back track.  We did have a nice time talking and enjoying nature without the kids!



Some of the beautiful flowers that
we passed during our hike.



 We finally made it to The Great Buddha and he was, in fact, Great!  We were able to go up inside the bottom of the statue, to get a glimpse of how it was made.  It was a very tight squeeze, but we were able to see some cracks and reconstructions due to various earthquakes.

We didn't have time to go down to the beach area because we had to get back for the kids after school.  We did get on the historic trains that run through the city and it was so tight that we couldn't even move.  Could have something to do with the fact that we went down during a Japanese holiday - not smart!