I met Yuki and her two friends early Saturday morning. We were heading off to Nikko to see the famous Shogun shrines and relax in the hot springs at Fukushima. It was a strange trip, mostly because Yuki's friends spoke very little English, so the burden was on Yuki to play translator between us.
Fujio and Junji are married and have a car, which makes them godlike in my eyes. They were also very happy to plan the whole trip because they had visited Nikko and the surrounding areas a few times. So, I was saved from having to schlep my stuff on and off trains and from having to make hotel reservations on my own. The downside, of course, was the traffic that plagues this great land. We spent a large part of our 48-hour trip in the car.
One particularly painful stretch was spent on our way up a mountain to a "cute" little town that Fujio and Junji has discovered a few years ago. What they didn't know was that it was recently featured on a TV travel program, so many other people were trying to discover it, too. The worst thing about the traffic was finding out that the cause of it was a single, well-intentioned, but deeply flawed man. He was directing traffic in and out of the only parking lot in the town. The lot was full, so he just stopped the cars and instituted a "one out, one in" policy. And so we waited.
It was this guy's fault.
The "cute town" is called Ouchijuku (ouch is right) and it is literally one street. The people who live there each have a business in the front of their home (restaurants, produce, souvenirs).
It was very quaint, but not quite worth the three-hour journey (including the two hours spent crawling in traffic). 
Yuki modeling the latest fashions.
Lest you think it was all bad:
Nikko was really very interesting. The weather wasn't so good (rainy) but it didn't keep us from exploring all the temples and shrines in the Tosho-gu area. This is where the famous "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys are carved over the entrance to one of the buildings. 
One of the great Shoguns, Tokugawa Ieyasu, is buried there.
Shogun Tomb
To get to his tomb, we had to pass under the shrine of the sleeping cat and climb a very steep series of stairs. There's a landing with a sign that says, "Your burden is heavy and life is short. Take a rest." (Which we did.) 
Sleeping Cat
The hotel was fun, too. They had 6 different kinds of hot springs, both indoor and outdoor. They also had a karaoke box, but we didn't participate. We just watched the old men in their yukatas serenade their wives. Dinner was particularly interesting. There was a tray of various foods common to most Japanese meals (sushi, rice, tofu, pickles, etc) but the main course was prepared in the irori (hearth).
Irori.
The meat and veggies were delicious; the fish that stared at me with it's one dead eye was not my favorite.
But the shiatsu was fabulous.
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