Driving in Hyogo and Kyoto - devil bugs and flower parks

For poops and giggles, Yukino and I headed up the western side of Hyogo just to look around.  Its a big prefecture and has a lot of fun roads and things to see. 

Even in the middle of nowhere there are tuning shops doing pretty cool work like wide body conversions (white MR2) and full blown race cars (pink S2000)-

I believe our camera was really struggling to take good photos at this point-

To the top we went!

Going up was a breeze on nicely paved roads.  Going down was a bumpy bumpy ride

Going down a dead end (I do this a lot.  20% of the time its not closed as the sign says) brought us to an interesting camping place.  I gotta take the fam here sometime-

Gotta love the hairpins in Japan-

A waterfall!

The walk from where we parked was a short one but absolutely HORRIBLE!  There were hundreds of small, strange looking flying insects that attacked us none stop between the car and the waterfall.

Again, with Yukino so pregnant, any small foot bridge was a trial for her.  Especially ones that looked like this while trying to bat away devil bugs-

 Another dam!  And, luckily we could drive across this one and go around the other side of the reservoir.  The other side is always better than the normally traveled side.

Cool shrine in the middle-

Just across the border in Kyoto is this strange "Flower Park" that I had noticed before.   This time I went in for further inspection, managed to open the gate and had a looksee.  The now defunct "park" is quite large, take over an entire hillside but looks to be slowly integrating with the next door factory.