Oya Rock Caves

We have been doing so much lately, I’m getting behind blogging about it. First thing yesterday morning we went to the train station to pick up our friend Yuhei! He hasn’t seen Caroline since she was a baby in America, and he had never met Nathan. But Yuhei is awesome with kids and they both quickly gravitated to him and had a lot of fun with him. After adding Yuhei to our party, we went to the Oya Rock Caves. Oya rock is unique to the Utsunomiya area apparently. There is a giant quarry under the mountains where it gets mined. They opened it up to the public for tours. Its pretty amazing.

Right outside the caves is a little Coy pond. I think the kids might have enjoyed that more than the caves.

Then near the caves, there is a giant buddha statue carved out of the mountain. So we drove for 3 minutes to go visit that next.

Also I forgot to mention, earlier in the day we went to Utsunomiya Castle ruins. It wasn’t too impressive, but they were doing some renovations on it and the kids found an excavator to watch.