Saturday drive to Kuma

Since the beginning of 2009, I've been trying to go for a 20-30 minute walk every day. I usually walk one route, but decided to try a different route last Thursday. I went towards to the elementary school near our house, and walked up behind to a small shrine there (sorry, no photos). It was nice to walk a new route and break the day-in, day-out routine. So on Saturday, I thought that going for a drive outside of the city would be a nice change of pace as well. I decided to drive up to the small village of Kuma. The last time I was there was in October 2005, which was shortly after arriving in Japan. We started off the drive and as we turned the corner near our house, we saw a couple thousand ducks (Tufted ducks & Wigeons) resting in the bay area:

We then started driving north and first stopped at a dam on Inasa Lake:

As we continued north, I took some of the very narrow roads through the forests. I love the winding roads, but I always have to be careful of oncoming cars. Luckily today, I hardly met any other cars, and never had to back up to let anybody by:
We finally got up to Kuma, where we stopped at a popular restaurant for soba noodles. Ayako had the (not-so-common) thick noodles:
I had the more common thin noodles:
Very yummy:
We looked around at the store there and saw some daikon radishes being dried outside:
We then had a nice drive back home. It was a beautiful day for a drive today, so I'm glad we took good advantage of it.