Day 41: Temples 60, 61, 62

It's children's day today. First part of the day was a walk to the trailhead to the temple. We walked with Ellie and Chizuru who are repeat section hikers.

Along the way, I saw a large yard full of vending machines and a nice henro hut .

The road headed into the mountains where I saw a small shrine for Kobo Daishi.

At the trailhead I saw this neat pop-up RV based on a kei car chassis.

Then we hiked up a beautiful and steep trail to the temple and beyond to a view point.

There were many day hikers at the viewpoint where you can see Mt.Ishizuchi. We modeled our ohenro-san jackets for them.

Temple 60, Yokomineji is surrounded by rhododendrons and is one of my favorites so far.

A butterfly joined us for lunch at the temple. One of the hikers gave us some special home-made Kashiwamochi which is made for children's day.

We saw a Japanese pheasant on the hike down to the next temple.

Temple 61, Kōonji is large building with both halls inside where you pray.

Temple 62, Hōjuji is very small and in the city.

We then went to our Ryokan where we we stayed with several ohenro-san that we were walking with today and were served a big shabu shabu dinner.

We walked 26.4km today. You can see a map of my tracks here (you may have to refresh the page after a minute to get it to show).  If you have Google Earth, it is faster to download a Google Earth file of my adventure from here.