Walking: 88 Temple Pilgrimage in Shikoku, Japan - October 2023

We were on the 7:40 high school special train this morning.  I have one thing to say to pretty young Japanese women on the train ... blow your nose!  We were crammed pretty tight and the sniffling was horrible.  Paper products in Japan must be made of gold because nobody uses them.  By the time we got to Kokubu Station most of the snifflers had gotten off and we had seats for the last few stops. Temple 80 was only a few blocks away.  I thought it was a nice temple; had some charm but it was overloaded with new statues.  It was like someone decided to jazz the place up a bit by ordering a bunch of statues. As we walked up the hill through the suburbs we had to dodge a few cars rushing to work or getting the kid to the train station on time. When we got past the houses we started to climb.  It was about a 350m climb and it took us about an hour.  We crossed a road and continued ...

Tonight is one of those nights when the blog is hard.  I got in after 4pm and went to the Onsen while my laundry was in.  It wasn't done so we had a beer.  It got done but we had another.  Then we went to a brew pub where we had several more.  Now it's much later than usual and I'm tired. We took the 7:56 train back to Konzoji Station.  On board were hords of high school kids. Japanese kids can be pretty rude to anybody else on their train. Not all were glued to their phones today; some had books open ... must be test day. Temple 76 was just down the street from the station.  Big temple, not much charm and quite a few Henro.  There was a group of European women we saw a few times during the day.  Some tour group, I think. At Temple 77 we saw Leo from Taiwan and snow Henro hut guy.  We saw them again at Templ...