Autumn Festival in Nikko

Beautiful bridge in the heart of Nikko village. So quaint!

Avery, being totally cute as always!

I love the fall colors here!

Family picture at the gates to one of the temples we visited. The Japanese people are so nice and always offer to take our pictures even if they don't speak any English!

Check out those super tall Cedars! They were beautiful!

This is the crowd at the parade. The worst part about being in Japan is just the masses- always, everywhere we go, crowds like this! Makes me miss Alaska!

Picts from the parade- can't remember what era these warriors were from. Below is a pict of some Samurai!

Rich wasn't leaving until we got this picture!

Another long, exhausting day, but so much fun!

Avery's down for a "rest", so I have a few minutes to try to get caught up on all the sights we've seen! We have to call it a rest now, no nap or she freaks out. She ends up falling asleep about 20 minutes into her little rest, so I don't care what she calls it! She has been a great napper since we've been here in Japan, I hope this carries over back to Alaska with us because she would never nap at home, and it she did she'd be up till midnight wreaking havoc on the house. Very sneaky little thing! I'll have to post sometime about the night at my aunt's where she snuck out of room and pretty much had a house party while we slumbered. The only way we woke up was when she started crying at 2 in the am because she fell in the potty. Anyway, a story for another day! Right now I'm going to attempt to catch up on some Japanese sight seeing. First off, we went to Nikko about 3 weeks ago and I still haven't blogged about it. It was the same weekend as the Asakusa trip. We went on an organized tour from base, so we caught a bus at 5:30am. This was a bit difficult for us, considering we have to bike about 35 minutes to catch the bus! So we ended up getting on our bikes at 4:45am and biking in the dark to catch the bus. Avery fell back asleep as soon as we got on, so that worked out good considering we had a 3 hour bus ride! Nikko is this beautiful National Park with 3 different temples fairly close. They are all nestled into the hillsides, very wooded and just awesome. The day we went was also the Autumn Festival and they had tons of booths and this really cool Samurai Parade where they had 1000 warriors marching in 100 different costumes. It was a great way to see some of the Japanese history through the warriors of each different period. The weather was great and we had a really great time. We might try to make it back to Nikko if we have time because we both agreed 1 day was not enough time!

OH, and I almost forgot. I need to document what we ate. We just sampled some dishes from the various food vendors. We had some delicious fried chiken that was seriously some of the best ever! It boneless, skinless chunks and the batter was so yummy! Then Richard made the mistake of ordering some white squares, I knew better but he insisted! I don't know the Japanese name for the dish, but it was no more than deep fried glutonous rice squares! Glutonous rice is my ultimate food enemy, and if you haven't eaten it don't! Melissa, you are the only American I've ever met that actually likes the stuff- yuck! Richard tried to choke down the chunks of chewy nastiness cause he hates to waste money. But then he regretted it the rest of the day! Not to worry, we got back at 6:30 in time to ride out bikes to a little chinese restaurant where we got some delicious chinese food and Avery again ate her weight in rice.