Wednesday, June 22
For our last day in Japan we spent most of it on the bikes. It was great weather - cloudy but no rain and the temperature stayed pretty mild, for Japan in June anyway. The bike shop was once again very helpful in giving us a map and directions, this time north and west of the city, as opposed to our north and east route on the first day with the bikes. Our first stop with Kinkakuji Temple, also known as the Golden Pavilion.

The pavilion was the Shogun's summer palace and it's golden because it's covered with gold leaf. It was very crowded and seemed to be set up mostly as a photo op destination but the grounds were beautiful.

We stayed long enough to take some obligatory pictures and then got back on the bikes again. The second leg we had a bit more trouble following the map and ended up not so much lost as not where we meant to be on the map. But we found many helpful people to get us back to where we needed to be and we got to see more of the countryside and small neighborhood lanes and less of the city streets. It's clearly early in the rice season as we saw lots of rice paddies with young seedlings just starting to grow.

We did finally reach our destination, the Tenryuji Temple and the Path of Bamboo.