Mt. Oyama

Yesterday we decided to go to Mt. Oyama because Derrick did not have to work. We had no idea what to expect. I looked it up on the internet and saw there was a temple and a shrine there. It took us maybe 45 minutes to get there. We had Japanese people guiding us to our parking spot and we had to walk quite a distance to get to where we thought we wanted to go. We ended up following some other people because we really had no idea. We ended up going on a back street behind houses so we would not have to walk on the road. We got to some shops and I thought it was kind of cool. We would walk up some stairs then it would be flat for a little bit then more stairs. We walked well over 100 stairs. Once we got to the top of the stairs we had the option of hiking up or going on a cable car. We chose the cable car and it was a good thing we chose that because it would have been a long hike. At the top we went up more stairs and saw a temple, then looked around and found more stairs that were very steep. It was almost like climbing a ladder. We came across a trail and decided to take it, not knowing where we would end up. They had stairs, but it was made out of rocks and logs and some rocks were pretty big to climb on. It was not bad at all, but Cole was getting cold and he would not keep his mittens on. I carried him up for a little and also tried to get him to walk to get warm. We wanted to get to the top of the mountain but decided it would be better to go down because Cole was pretty cold. I carried him down some of the way, which was a little more difficult because the steps (rocks) were so big. I am glad Derrick was there to help me. To help Cole we ended up singing primary songs on the way down. It was a pretty fun hike and we want to hike all the way to the top sometime. It was not that hard of a hike, especially if there were all these old Japanese people doing it.