We are not even in the rafts yet and the water fight has begun!

Dave gets Jimmy D.

Squirting the Hellgate boat.

Thanks Jimmy D. He sneaked up on me. That water is cold!

Floating through Hellgate Canyon.

Dave jumped out of the raft in Hellgate Canyon. He just wanted to be able to say he swam it.
It's 100 feet deep here.

Going on down the river.

This is me, having a great time. I almost didn't do this trip. I am soooo glad I did!

This is Dave.

This is Craig, Pat's husband.

This is Pat.

This is Diane.

This is Ron, Diane's husband.

We elected Larry to be our stern guy. He has been on this river and the American River several times. He did a great job. At one point we went through a rough rapid and the front end and back ends of the raft came together in a V and Larry was flipped head over heals into the river. Thank goodness we had practice getting someone back in the boat when Dave took his swim. It isn't easy.

They said they were wimps (not supposed to get wet) but we got them anyway.

They are loading up their water guns. We are about to get drenched. I love it!

And the race is on.

Going through the canyon.

We never could shake Neil and his crew. Dave was always trying to ram them.

We finally got tired of being drenched by mega blasters, so we decided to get ahead of these two boats and take the lead. We were being blasted from front and back.

This is not the worst rapid we went through. The last one looked liked Niagra Falls. We went barreling through and came to an abrupt stop on a large rock. Dave had gotten his leg caught between the rock and the bottom of the raft. Everyone but me was thrown into the bottom of the raft. When Dave freed himself the boat came loose, he then climbed quickly back into the raft because we had more rapids to go through. His foot was swollen for a couple of days, but is much better now.

We bailed after every rapid we went through.

We are finally leading the pack.

We hit a spot in the river that was so still the reflections were wonderful.

I love the reflection.

A momma duck and her babies.

This is Morrison's Lodge on the river.
I hear it is a great place to have lunch.

Just another beautiful picture of the river.

Japan 2009 - Start from the bottom

They have small parks everywhere. They are very well manicured and usually have some water flowing through them. This park was across the street from our hotel.

Japan is very clean, no trash anywhere that I saw and no grafitti.
People respect each other and the land. We had a great time and a lot of luck. The weather was gorgeous, the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, our guides and the people we toured with were friendly and fun to be with and there was even a full moon!

I am guessing this is where they hook up their fire hoses. They like cartoons.

Their teeter totters and really cool!

We had a lot of time before we left for the airport so the 2 Ellens and the 2 Diannes went for a walk. We walked into a park where the kids were playing baseball. Note that they don't have baseball bats or gloves. You can see the ball in mid air just before he hits it with his hand. He hit it good and the four of us were jumping up and down and screaming, "Run, run, run!" The parents who were there heard us and starting laughing, then we started laughing.

Part of the Observation Lounge in the Tokyo Tower has a glass floor. This is me standing on it. You can see the bottom of the tower lit up underneath my feet. This was feaky!

This picture was taken from the top of the Tokyo Tower.
It just happened that there was a full moon that night.
This is one of my favorite pictures.

You cannot imagine how happy I was to see this. We went in and I got my regular white mocha (which, by the way, tasted just like the ones at home,) where we stayed for a half an hour or so until it was time to get back on the bus.

Our last day of the tour and we went to the Ginza District in downtown Tokyo.

Never heard of a lot of the stores there. It was a lot like Rodeo Drive but much bigger (taller, anyway.)

Like this store. They come from all over the world. Very busy and very expensive.

Ellen and I were so tired.
We walked a bit before we found a familiar site - Starbucks.

I took this picture under a cherry tree.

This is the Imperial Garden. Notice the smog in the background. It was like this everyday and it was everywhere we went, except when we were on Mt. Fuji. It's near the end of our stay and the cherry blossoms are falling from the trees. Here they are floating on the water. We got to see them 100% in bloom and we got to see them fall off the trees like snow.

We were on the boat going to the gardens when I saw this child behind us. Couldn't resist taking his picture.

I took this picture from the boat. We saw a lot of this in the country (clothes hanging to dry on the patio) but I was surprised to see that they even do it in Tokyo.

The boat we took to the Hama Rikyu Imperial Gift Garden.

Yes, they do have McDonald's. They did add some Japanese-style food, however.

I took this picture from the porch, through chicken wire. Ellen and I saw someone we knew inside so we went inside. We took our shoes off, of course, and we had done the smoke cleansing. When we came out there was a policeman waving at us. Then he went behind us where there were other people (that weren't supposed to be there) coming out. We quickly put on our shoes and left. We evidently were not supposed to be in there.

eimayi
Before you can enter the temple you have to fan this incense smoke all over you, which we did.

Another temple. You can hardly see it for all the people.

And this is a very famous bridge at the Imperial Palace.

This was a store on the property outside the Imperial Palace gates. The cherry trees were starting to lose their blossoms. It looked like it was snowing.

Samuri statue in front of the Imperial Palace. The palace is behind a wall so we couldn't actually see it, but they do have a museum so you can see pictures of it.

This is the Tokyo Tower with our hotel in the front of it.
I took night pictures from the almost top of it. The round part.