On our final day in Kanazawa visiting my host family the Murakami’s, we went out for a bit of a road trip.

We drove south from Kanazawa down the western coast of Honshu to a spot famous for scenic columnar basalt cliffs. Seafood, as always, was available on site!

We stayed for a good while watching the swells come in and crash against the cliffs. The breeze felt fantastic.

Before piling back into the car Mom sampled the local icecream flavors with gusto.

The Murakami’s car had its own GPS system, which we found quite interesting!

After a much longer drive we unloaded at the foot of a range of mountains in the tiny town of Eiheiji. We were now in Fukui prefecture. Our destination was… Eihei-ji! aka Eihei Temple, aka The Temple of Eternal Peace. Quite a name!

Wikipedia has a very nice article on Eiheiji, so I’ll just get out of the way and let you read that while looking at our photos!

That night outside our hotel Mom insisted we take a picture of the RIONS pachinkou parlor and the Lawson convenience store. I actually went inside RIONS to see if they had any RIONS branded promotional items but sadly they did not. The Lawson thing, IIRC, is because a coworker of hers had the same name? It’s not exactly rare…

And that was it for our excursion northward. The following morning we would return to Tokyo for the last days’ adventures before my folks headed back to the States…