The trial runs didn't work out. Ana hiked Hakusan with full trail weight on her back and tore up her calf muscles, which have been problematically inflexible since forever. The bad news is that that the injury cancelled all the awesome hiking this summer. The good news is that it happened now when there is time to get it fixed and her team of excellent physical therapists only costs about $8 per visit on our "socialized medicine" Japanese insurance. This should hopefully make for a stronger, better Ana, capable of hiking the Appalachian Trail next year.
So, our major summer adventures needed replacement. The killer thing about Japan in August is that absolutely the entire country is on vacation, meaning that travel and lodging cost about double. We decided to do a series of generally more local tourist voyages and see a lot of the stuff we hadn't gotten around to in the Kanazawa area to keep costs down and to avoid having to do more complicated travel off the cuff.
For our first trip, we chose Kaga Onsen, an area about thirty miles south of us that we've been to twice before, but haven't explored much. We've only seen Natadera out of a few dozen nearby tourist attractions. We found a hotel that wasn't too expensive for the two nights we wanted, and thought we might get away with biking there and back because it had been more than a month since Hakusan, Ana's legs were feeling pretty good, and it's pretty much flat all the way there - and casual biking being a lot less strenuous than hiking.
We passed some ripening rice fields along the way, and had a rather peaceful and leisurely ride out:
Until about noon, nine miles into the 27 mile trip, when Ana realized that the twinges in her legs were actually warning twinges rather than just stretching, and we switched to plan B. We were back home by 1:30, grabbed some lunch and showers, switched helmets for hats and bike gear for train-riding entertainment, caught a bus downtown and were on the 3:25 train out to Kaga Onsen, arriving probably not a whole lot later than we would have done on the bikes.
We stayed in Daishoji, a 4-minute $2 train ride from Kaga Onsen, because it's summer and all the reasonably priced hotels in the immediate area were already full. They have a nice cherry blossom festival in the Spring, one that we attended last year. The main entertainment offered by Daishoji was trying to find a place to eat, as far as we could see. The hotel had a "Beer Festa" going on in their restaurant, an all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet focusing on beer and "steak", but we didn't feel like trying to get our money's worth on that the first night. Daishoji being a small temple town in the middle of nowhere, none of the (few) restaurants had plastic food outside, or even Japanese menus for that matter. We were looking for something that we wouldn't have to put too much effort into, like a Donburi (rice bowl) or Okonomiyaki restaurant, but couldn't really find any. We almost passed by the restaurant we eventually went with, because the building looked like a hair salon to us. As you can see, it's called Spice, a name MUCH more likely to be found on a Japanese hair salon than restaurant in my experience.
Luckily, we took a closer look, and found that this was actually a Thai/Vietnamese restaurant. We decided to try it out, and were pleasantly surprised at the atmosphere and quality of the food. We got delicious spring rolls, wonderful green papaya salad, some delicious spicy curries, and, much to our amazement, real non-Japanese long-grain Jasmine rice!
The next day we started our actual sightseeing. Check out the rest of the delicious dinner (and, you know, other stuff) in the Flickr album!
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