Great start to the summer holidays

After wandering around the Saturday market in Nagoya with Alexis, I went to Nagoya Station, bought my train pass for this summer and continued up to Konan to visit with John and Shoko.
First we went out to a Japanese restaurant in Konan and it was delicious!! We had some neat appetizers follow by sashimi tofu curds and scallops. They insisted that dinner was their treat, so I treated us to coffee and dessert... tiramsu and green tea/ red bean cake with ice creammmm....
I stayed the night at their place and we had a very relaxing Sunday morning with a leisurely breakfast. In the afternoon, we decided to go for a drive into Gifu prefecture - the mountains! On the way there, we stopped a cute coffee shop called "Canada" because it is a wooden A-framed shaped building. There I had toast with red bean paste.
The drive through the mountains was stunning, along a curvy road, through tunnels, beside a river, between cliffs and trees and little communities. We stopped at a little market shop and while we bought some veggies and such, it started to pour... and I mean pour!!! Big sheets of rain tossled by the suddenly raging winds. It was awesome!!! It calmed down after about 10 minutes and we were able to get back to the car. At another market shop, there was a trestle covered in kiwi fruit vines, full of kiwis!
We continued up the valley following the river where we could see people with big long fishing poles, trying to catch "sweet fish" called so because they eat a sweet moss that grows in the river. We kept going until they found a restaurant on the side of the river where they had eaten before. There we ordered some "sweet fish" and ate them completely... I mean completely... head to tail fin and everything in between (even the bones!). They were really tasty and not very chewy at all. So cool!!
On the way back to Konan, it got dark and poured with rain. And we saw wild monkeys running across the road! How cool is that! I wanted to take them for dessert again, so we stopped by Baskin Robbins before they dropped me off at the train station. It was all around a randomly wonderful Sunday!