淡路島

This is a bit late but a couple of weekends ago we had a long weekend for Marine Day. What better way to celebrate Marine Day then by heading to the beach. Keiko found a nice cheap hotel on Awaji Island in the inland sea so we headed there for some quality R&R. The hotel was on top of a hill so it gave us a great view of the surroundings. There was a golf course as well and I was interested in potentially playing a round, but they had this asinine rule that golf shoes were absolutely necessary to play. Since they didn't rent shoes, and I only had sneakers (which are perfectly fine to play golf in by the way) so I couldn't get out on the course.

The beach was very nice and not crowded at all. Although I wish it would have been a little deeper. You could go out 50 meters or so and still only be knee deep. It's nice for little kids, but I wanted to get out in some deeper stuff.

Food was fantastic as well. The first night we ate at a small local restaurant and chatted with the locals. It seems to me that even more so than Osaka or Kyoto people, Awaji locals are intensely proud to be from Awaji Island. The second night we ate at the hotel which was featuring a Korean/Japanese buffet. It was nice, but I ate way too much.

The drive wasn't too bad either. We hit some traffic both way through Kobe. Why a city of 2 million only has 2 lane highways I'll never understand, but maybe that's just because Toronto's highways are massive. Anyway, once we got through that it was clear sailing.