Hello all!

We've gotten lots of positive feedback on the blog, and we're glad that everyone is enjoying it. It's fun being able to share our trip with you all.

Here's our latest update.

We just got back last night (2am) from an adventure down to Shikkoku, one of the smaller of the four main islands of Japan. This is the place that Erik and I visited last year, and had a particularly negative experience that involved lots of frustration with not reading Japanese, and driving. So, this time we brought Steve. We left on Tuesday morning, and drove down to Hiroshima to activate our JR passes that we will be needing later on in the trip (thanks Karina!). These passes arae only available to visitors, and we had some concerns that Steve wouldn't be able to activate his, but we were lucky, and had no problems. We're looking forward to taking advangtage of the rail system later on to get to Tokyo.

Anyway, after that we kept heading east to Onomichi, where we picked up bikes and started biking across a series of tiny islands that connects Shikkoku to the main island, Honshu. It was an amazing ride. The bridges were fantastic, and the scenery was even better. We made it half way the first day, and got in late to the only town on the middle island. The only place we could find to stay at was an awesome ryokan with an amazing onsen. Just what we needed after a day of biking. After a traditional Japanese breakfast there the next morning, we headed out again (our behinds are quite sore at this point) and headed to the next island to check out a shrine that houses most of Japans "National Treasures" which were some pretty spectacular samurai swords and armour (I'll let you guess whose idea this was...) :)

We had reached our time limit at this point, and biked back to the ferry that took us back to the ryokan where we had another bath (soooo nice!) before taking the ferry the rest of the way back to the mainland (so much easier by boat!:). After paying for our ridiculously expensive parking, we continued driving east to catch another ferry back to Shikkoku so we could head into the Iya Valley. It was getting pretty late at this point, so we cancelled our intended destination (a place called Chiiori, we never made it, but more on that later), and stayed the night in Kochira, and climbed the 800 steps up to a beautiful shrine the next day, on the top of Kompira-san(H, J, and K, I think you did this on your trip). A nice walk down and another great bath, and we were back in the car heading into the depths of the Iya Valley.

What can I say about the view? It was amazing. We drove down some pretty unbelievably narrow mountain roads, did a quick run across the vine bridges, then drove down a mountain. Pretty scary stuff. The roads are just wide enough for one car, and are very windy. Lots of backing up to let other cars pass.

A couple of hours later we were back in Oda, exhausted. Woke up this morning to go to school with Steve to Tomiyama valley Elementary School. I can't believe how beautiful these schools are! Anyway, this is the "Ebi-Cani Dance" school, and we started the day off with a rendition of that. The kids were so cute, and we got to take part in some cool drumming thing, and then they dressed us up in costumes to take pictures. Everyone has been so nice!

Wow. I can't believe that we've only been here for about a week. Steve is keeping us very busy, and we're having a great time. Hope everything is going well for everyone back home. Now I'm going to see if I can figure out how to post some pictures....wish me luck.

E+T:)