wish you were here (Art Sites)

I’m trying here to catch up with what I’ve been up too but I’ll have to start with last weekend. We had to cancel planes to go to the Hiwasa sea turtle beach cleanup event we were planning to go to in Tokushima on Saturday because of the rain forecast. My older son and I went last year, cleaned up and went to the sea turtle museum on the beach near where the turtles come up and lay their eggs. Too bad we had to cancel.
So we ended up meeting some friends we were planning to go with who are from Tokushima. Without too much planning (as usual), we ended up heading toward Tokushima and looking for a place between Takamatsu and Tokushima to meet up with them. We stopped around Tsuda-no-Matsubara, much closer to Takamatsu than Tokushima (sorry). As it was not raining at the time, we played on the beach there near a large swimming area which, at this time of the year, is completely empty. Before long though, it started to sprinkle. And then it got down right rainy. It was okay though as it was about time for lunch. We headed for an Italian restaurant we had been to before, a close drive from the beach, La Fresca. My wife went in to ask about the waiting time. Between our family and our friends there would be four adults and four kids so we were not expecting quick seating. But the woman who my wife talked to responded with the less than formal and rare one word response, “MURI!”. In other words, “Forget about it!”. I thought, Okay, no tatemae there eh? So we went to someplace else.
While driving around in the now pouring rain we noticed a place on the map my wife had heard of but not been to, Ooyama Bokujou. The homemade soft ice cream she had heard about was all I needed to know about so, after eating, this was out next destination.

This place was much more than good ice cream. They had lots of homemade bread and pastries which made me regret not just coming straight to there for lunch. The little shop has a huge kitchen you can look back to. The guy working there was cutting what looked like a round of sponge cake for the bottom of a cheese cake. With the rain clearing up for a little while we walked down the road to where they keep the Jersey cows, sheep, goats and ponies. I grew up around cows (Holsteins, not Jerseys) but it had been a while and the air brought back lots of childhood memories-and made my son exclaim that it smelled, well, like you would expect it to.

I noticed this three-wheeler, something I sort of wish I could have driven around a little bit. I’ll have to ask next time if they’ll let me take it for a spin if I throw some hay around. I’ll definitely be going back with a lighter stomach to try one of the curry pastries that they make after you order it.
After saying goodbye to our friends from Tokushima, we headed home. On the walk to grandma and grandpa’s for dinner the roads were lined with flowers drenched with rain screaming for me to photograph them.