The Payne Family: A Saturday's Wanderings

This Saturday Mike, David and I went A 'wandering.
(Matt was off globe trotting in Korea)

It wasn't really intentional...we were trying to go watch the Bull Fighting. Unfortunately, we were not able to find the Bull Fight, or any other part of the festival it was part of.
The local papers available on base often have wonderful events listed for the upcoming week...but details are often lacking! Finding the location of these events is challenging- often requiring hours of online research (and looking at lots of websites in Japanese!). They often list activities at events, but rarely list specific times (or list incorrect times).
You learn to go with the flow!!

We decided to give up on the Bull Fighting and located a nearby Castle ruins to visit. Hummm...did you know things are a lot easier to find when maps actually have names on the roads? And show ALL the roads so you can at least tell where you are?? We traveled around in good spirits, laughing about driving in circles all around where we wanted to go, but never finding the castle ruins (or any signs point to said ruins). After driving down lots of little back roads through farmlands and over hill and dale, we cut our losses and headed towards the coast.

Mike was a good sport as I would suddenly yell "Look at that! Go back, Go back! I need a picture!!" To humor me he finally turned around and pulled into a tiny marina at the Port of Maeda.

We sat on the wall and relaxed for a bit. I love the rock formations around here- they look like they have been eroded around the bottoms.

I decided to explore the tiny beach and after hearing
me "oohing" and "aahhing" Mike and David decided to join me.

The shells littering the beach were amazing. Mike ended up having to give David a piggy back ride across some of them since there were areas that had some very sharp shells.

There were SO many little hermit crabs. Some of them were unbelievably tiny- their shells only about 1/16 of an inch! This one was one of the larger ones. There were lots of them in the water too- they were much larger...some with shells up to 5 to 6 inches across.

This house (or it may be apartments) sits right on the beach. Almost ALL of the buildings here are cement....that could have something to do with all the typhoons they have here. Those people in Galveston Texas could learn something from these folks...

On the trek home we stopped at a FamilyMart to use the bathroom (you ask for a toilet here) and pick up a snack. The rice rolls were surprisingly good...have no idea what was in them, but they were good. The patty with the rice rolls was also