Boso Peninsula - Continuing the Drive Along the Pacific Coast (Page-6)   1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Boso Peninsula by Lyle H Saxon, Images Through Glass, Tokyo
Continuing my drive along the Pacific coast, I came to the Shirahama area, and while the sand wasn't exactly white (Shirahama means "White [sandy] Beach"), it was a lighter color than the sand at Enoshima, for example.  Again, this beach would have been full of people just a couple of weeks earlier, but was deserted in early September (except for the - difficult to see - surfers in the water in the left picture above), when these photos were taken.
Boso Peninsula by Lyle H Saxon, Images Through Glass, Tokyo
    
Boso Peninsula by Lyle H Saxon, Images Through Glass, Tokyo
The beaches were a bit overly lonely, but the largely empty roads I had no complaint with at all!  There are very few places to pass on most roads like this (above), so when it's crowded, all you can do is crawl along as part of the chain.  Parking is no easy task either.  September saved me from those worries; parking was no problem and I was able to freely drive everywhere at reasonable speeds.  (The middle photo above shows the Suzuki Wagon-R that was home for 24-hours.)
Boso Peninsula by Lyle H Saxon, Images Through Glass, Tokyo
Below left - I wanted to spend more time looking over this temple, but it was a popular tourist destination, and although the parking lots in the area were all mostly empty, they were all pay parking lots, and after paying for the reserved seat train ticket and rent-a-car, I only had enough money for fuel, so I couldn't afford any extra expenses - sooo... I parked by the temple gates with the flashers on and just took a few pictures before continuing down the road.  Food?  I had some nuts in my backpack and I bought a two-liter bottle of water at the start of the trip.  Sleep?  In the car of course, but only a few hours....
Boso Peninsula by Lyle H Saxon, Images Through Glass, Tokyo
After the last rays of the sun dimmed in the western sky, I had some of the best experiences of the trip in spots too dark for hand-held photography, one such moment related in LL-329, in "In the Sound of the Ocean Waves...", another being by a lighthouse on a deserted road in the middle of the night (at a spot that was very nice, but I was afraid of falling asleep in such a deserted area).  After a few mostly sleepless hours, I drove back to Tateyama to return the rent-a-car.  I was too tired at this point to take pictures, but experienced the sunrise while sitting in the car in a park at the base of the Tateyama Castle hill.  Actually... it's more complicated than that... I got back to Tateyama a bit quicker than I thought I would and so I drove along the bay to Kanaya, where I contemplated trying to ride the first cable car of the day up to Mt. Nokogiri, but realized I wouldn't have enough time after doing that to get the rent-a-car back to Tateyama in time, so I drove back to Tateyama in the last minutes of the night and then I experienced the sunrise by Tateyama Castle.  After the sunrise (right photo above - taken at 5:20 a.m.), I went to a local beach to burn off the remaining time and then sleepily returned the good-car Wagon-R to the JR rent-a-car office at Tateyama Station.
     It was a good trip, but it would have been better if I had arranged to return the car up on the Pacific coast somewhere, which would have enabled me to drive twice as far....

Copyright 2006 by Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon, Images Through Glass, Tokyo