An hour's walk

John and I try to get out for an hour's walk everyday.  We're both trying to work off a little extra weight!

This isn't really a great season to take photos of the neighborhood but I haven't taken my camera out with me on a walk for awhile and so I set my phone to 5 minute intervals and every time it beeped I stopped and took a picture.

Okay...  We left the house and started down the road to the main street.  John has to make his bathroom stop along the way and so it took us the whole five minutes just to get out to neighborhood entrance.

Beep!

This is the main entrance to the neighborhood.  My house is all the way at the back and down a far street on the right at the very edge.  There are actually only two ways into this neighborhood, this entrance and the one in front of my house after the rice fields.  Okay let's head towards the elementary school.

Beep!

This is the sidewalk heading to the elementary school.  Both the children walking in this direction to the school and the middle grade kids on their bicycles going in the opposite direction use this sidewalk because the road is too narrow to handle bicycles as well as two way traffic.  Keep on walking!

Beep!

Yeah!  Here we are at MY crosswalk and I stand on the corner there in front of the sweet shop.  My walk to school is almost exactly 15 minutes.  The school is behind the sweet shop sort of hidden away.  It can only be approached on foot from this direction and there is a gate and a net (to keep balls inside the grounds) that it is part of my duty to open and close.  No school this day.  Keep walking!

Beep!

John and I continued past the school and along a road we travel only on occasion.  The distant mountains are the divider between the city of Nikko and the closest city to us.  I think these are all rice fields that look pretty blah in this season...  Keep walking!

Beep!

John and I turned off onto a farming road meaning that most of the traffic along here is only tractors and pickup trucks.  The road follows the river past large farms, a few family graveyards and some ojizo statues.  John's about ready to head home so we took a short cut past a farmhouse.

Beep!

Ooh look!  A sign of spring!  Keep on plodding...

Beep!

This is sort of a typical farm house.  The sloping Japanese style roof, the red tool and tractor shed.  A dog house out in front...  This house is across the street from the school so we are back in that direction again.

Beep!

We are back on the narrow road with the sidewalk only headed back home.  The expressway passes over the road and I stood here for a minute or so waiting for a car to go over the overpass.  Not much traffic this day on either the expressway nor the main street.  Yes, this is the main street I keep talking about.  You can see that at one point it doesn't even have a divider line anymore.

Beep!

The crosswalk in the distance is where I took the first photo at the beginning of this walk, at the entrance to the neighborhood.  Along this main street there are farm houses and a small mechanic garage, fields, and the entrance to the cemetery is way past the crosswalk on the right side of this street.  We turn to the left to head home.

Beep!

And here we are finally at home!  That was an hour's walk!  With the forest gone the scenery is different from pictures I've shown in the past of our house surrounded by trees.  We get more sun now...  and we do have a beautiful view of the mountains when the weather is nice.  Even though this day wasn't particularly sunny we still hang our laundry out on the balcony of the second floor...  We can get both our small cars in this short driveway.  Home Sweet Home!

I'll try another timed walk in another season when hopefully there will be more to see.  At least more color!