Hakone Trip part III: Lake Ashi and Hakone Shrine

After we left Owakudani, the bus took us to Lake Ashi where we boarded a boat that would take us to the other side of the lake. The boat was very pretty, but it had limited seats, and by that time all we really wanted to do was sit down and rest.

After we got off the boat, the bus took us a block to our large, expensive, gift shop. We looked around for a few minutes, and then headed out back to get some pictures of the lake. I spotted some big, stuffed pandas that looked like they were for climbing on, so I told the kids to go ahead and play for a few minutes. When we got closer we realized that they had a sign that said 200 yen on it. We had no idea what they did, but slipped a coin into it anyways.

The panda then started to play music and walk. Aaron was able to catch a really quick video clip of it before it stopped. It's really short, but it's still cute to hear Mateo laughing at the end.

After we left the giftshop, we drove to the Hakone Shrine. It was very pretty, but unfortunatly I had a hard time getting pictures of the Tori gate that is in the water due to the sun's position.

We walked a billion stairs up to the Shrine at the top, and I spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out where to get my Shrine book stamped.

Finally, after asking the Souvenir sales lady 3 times in my broken Japanese where to get my stamp, she finally said "parking"......if she had said this the first time, I would've realized that I had to walk all the way down to the bottom of the stairs which I had just come up to get it. I came so close to going into the monk's office to try to get my stamp. Glad I hesitated on that one, and turned back for better directions.

After the Shrine we made our way back onto the bus and headed home.