Neighbourhood cleaning

Spring has come, and so has neighbourhood clean-up time. Ayako and I were up early to go help our neighbourhood clean a local community centre. The cleaning was to begin at 8:00 a.m. so we got there 5 minutes early. Our neighbours, however had already been cleaning from 7:45. With so many hands getting to work, everything was finished by 8:10. I heard that we'll be doing some beach cleaning at the beginning of June.
After that short warm-up for cleaning, we drove to the south part of Tenryu River to help with cleaning the beach with some friends. Along the way, we could see many other neighbourhoods doing some cleaning as well. Here's Ayako getting ready to work hard:
We walked towards the beach and found lots of garbage along the way, including TVs, fridges, rice cookers and many shoes:
About 20 people came out to help pick up garbage. Here's a shot of some of them carrying a large fridge off the beach:
I was able to take the last picture from a small lookout. Turning 90 degrees gave me the next shot of the walking/bicycling path that runs along the beach ('hama' in Japanese) through the pine trees ("matsu" in Japanese). Thus, the name of our city, Hamamatsu.
Afterwards, we gathered at Mike's for a BBQ lunch and enjoyed talking and eating together: