Our Something New: A piece of bread for every step

Sometime in September, it just so happened that Keenan and Eric were traveling for work at the same time. This gave Sarah and me a good excuse for another day trip (not that we needed one)! We ventured down the east coast to a place called Kitayamazaki Cliffs. Or, as we like to call it, "the thousand steps place." In Japan, it seems that in order to get to any rock worth getting to, you either have to ascend or descend a crap-load (pardon my French) of steps! And as you know, what goes up must come down and what goes down...must come up? Okay, that phrase doesn't work in this scenario, but long story short: to see cool things, prepare to walk steps. A lot of them.

It took us a few hours (by car) to get to our destination. Before getting to the cliffs (and a park where you can see the cliffs from an observation deck before taking the steps down to beach level), we searched for a light house. We saw signs for it (we think), but were never able to actually spot it. We had a few theories, which included everything from 'we just couldn't find it' to 'it was destroyed in the tsunami.' Either way, mission find cool lighthouse: failed.

But that was no problem because we still had a lot of steps to walk and cool rocks to see! We started at the observation deck before making our way to the stairs.

There were 363 stairs to the second observation platform (I didn't count, there were signs).

Sign basically says, "Watch out! Or the ocean will eat you, too!"

There were an additional 510 to the beach. 873 stairs (plus a few apparently unofficial steps that were not counted) later, we were up pretty close to some monster rocks. They were positively spectacular! The water was a gorgeous color blue and it was incredible to see (and hear) the power of the waves crashing upon the rocks.

Before taking the stairs down, Sarah and I had visions of being able to spend some time meandering the beach (read: a little time to prepare for the trip back up). But once we got down there, we realized that all of the meandering space had been eaten away by the ocean. As a result, we pretty much walked down the steps, took some photos, oohed and ahhed a sufficient amount, then turned around and went back up.

The up was not quite as much fun as the down, but we made it! And when we say, "we walked, like, a thousand steps," we aren't lying...almost.

Moments after this picture was taken, we had reached the top and were sitting on a bench catching our breath. I held Bean up, looked her in the eye, and praised her for all her hard work! It must have been hard for a little baby to walk so many steps! Her response was to spit up...in  my mouth...and that's how she felt about all those steps.

Step #1. No seriously, they are numbered.

Walking, like, a thousand steps made us pretty hungry. So, for dinner, we stopped at an Italian restaurant with an "all you can eat" bread bar. Our meals were delicious, Bean tried her very first bread, and Sarah and I had a piece of bread for every step. We had, like, a thousand pieces of bread.