Shimoda

We've been hearing how wonderful Shimoda is since our very first summer here, but for some reason we never headed down there until this summer. And everyone was right, it was a delightful beach getaway. Weather didn't always cooperate, but we found some fun rainy weather activities to make the most of it. We had a later start driving down, because we went through the Tokyo Temple Openhouse. But we still found the time to stop when we saw a waterfall on the side of the road. It was Joren Falls, which was a really dramatic waterfall with the columnar rock formation on the wall behind it. They were also selling fresh wasabi, which I hadn't previously tried.

Then we made it to our airbnb and headed to Cafe Mellow. It was delicious, especially their curry and their garlic shrimp. Although their burgers did taste exactly like my meatloaf...which was a bit of a turnoff for our kids. After dinner we headed over to the beach nearby, Kisami Ohama Beach, to catch the sunset. It's a lovely salt and pepper beach with rock formations and caves on one side.

The next day we woke up to rain, which didn't stop all day. So we made some non-beach plans. We went to the Shimoda Aquarium, which was reall great for dolphin and seal shows. They only had a few exhibits besides the shows, but the shows were really amazing, like a dolphin throwing his trainer up in the air and they both did a flip at the same time. They also had the dolphins jump over boats and do other amazing things. The sea lion show was so fun too.

After we headed over to the Ryugu Beach Cave. It's not really a cave anymore as the ceiling is missing, but still cool. The kids had fun wading in, and it didn't matter if we got wet beacause we were already soaked from the rain. There was a fun place to sled on a sand dune there, but it was closed because of the rain. So we just checked out the dune.

Then we headed to Cape Tsumeki to walk out to the lighthouse and climb on the cool rocks (also columnar formations). After that we felpt cold, wet and hungry so we headed into town and ate at Magic India (we all just love Indian food and we needed some comfort after being rained on all day).

The next day was Sunday and we wanted to appreciate the beautiful Earth God created so we headed to Kawazu Seven Falls. On the way we stopped at Mineonsen Daifunto Park. It was a geyser that went every 1/2 hour. We cooked eggs in the hotspring while we waited for it and then soaked our feet in the footbath. The seven waterfall hike was AMAZING! It was a more difficult hike than expected, lots of uphill, but the waterfalls were worth it.

In the afternoon we stopped at Sotoura Beach, a protected bay that felt so calm it was like swimming in a pool. The sand was wonderful, the sun was out and we swam the afternoon away. We revisited Cafe Mellow for dinner.

Our last full day we wanted to do a boat tour of an area with a diferent sea cave. On our was we stopped by Irozaki cape and stopped at several lookouts in the area. We also had a troop ov monkeys stop in front of us on the raod, which was pretty cool to see. When we got to the sea caves, the boat tours were closed beacause of weather (maybe because of the wind or surf?). So we explored the cave by foot (i.e. looked at it from above through the hole in the roof). And then explored the coast.

In the afternoon we boogie boarded and played in the sand at the Kisami Ohama beach. Pace and I explored the caves too, which was cool, but there were a lot of beach roaches around (which I had to put my fear away so I could explore with Pace). We had the beach nasically to ourselves, but the weather was nice for the afternoon. We tried out Spice Dog, which was a Thai/Okinawan/Bakery like restaurant. It turned out pretty delicious.

The next morning we were heading home along the easter coast of the Izu Peninsula. We stopped off at a cool painted pedestrian tunnel and then checked out Ebisu Island.

Our next stop was Jogasaki Coast and we did a short walk along the coast.

Our final stop was Izu-Tobu, a grass covered volcano. It had a chair lift up to the top and the views were pretty amazing...despite a few clouds rolling in. It was huge, much larger than I thought from the pictures. And yes I included a picture of a picture, haha, because I wanted to remember what it looked like from above. We also bought the most delicious cute watermelon mochi.

We had a wonderful trip, and hope we can make it again to Shimoda.