Livin' the McDream: Frozen Waterfalls - Oirase Gorge & Lake Towada in winter

What better thing is there to do on a snowy Saturday than go check out a frozen winter wonderland?? We decided to check out the Oirase Gorge (40.518497,140.964103) and Lake Towada (40.430742,140.892496) to see how they are transformed by the cold and snow.
Side note...yes, I got my haircut. It ended up much shorter than I intended and I regretted it immediately. Sad.

Quick snow update: As of January 13th the season total snowfall is 40.9" so we are catching up to the season average! (44" for this time of the year)

You may remember our visits to "the gorge" and Lake Towada in previous posts. We've been there several times...this time it looked like a completely different place!

We managed to follow the "path" along the stream to
get up close to these falls for the picture above.

Beautiful drive. Hardly any cars today.

The size of the icicles was insane!

Had to shuffle up the "stairs" sideways.

From Oirase Gorge we drove south around the lake to a little town on the shore. We visited a shrine, once again a place we'd visited before that was completely different with a coating of snow. It was very calm and peaceful. The path leading to the shrine was still pretty well traveled even with the snow. The "path" to the lake, however, had not been walked on at all recently so we had to stomp our way through.

Ice for purification?

Don't think this will be a problem...

This dock is a little farther around the lake,
but a place we always try to visit.

For dinner we went to a restaurant in Towada City called Dohtonbori (40.614409,141.21473). A completely new experience with a type of food called okonomyaki, sometimes referred to as a "savory Japanese pancake." Other than the fact that it's cooked on a griddle and is round-ish there's no resemblance to a pancake. There are a couple of different styles of okonomyaki based on their place of origin. One is the Hiroshima style and the other is the Osaka style. The basic ingredients are a flour batter, shredded cabbage and egg, other ingredients like meat, seafood, vegetable or cheese are sometimes added. Hiroshima style layers the ingredients on the griddle and noodles are included as an ingredient. In the Osaka style (which we had) all the ingredients are mixed together and then cooked on the griddle. Traditionally, the finished product is garnished with a sauce similar to a thick, sweet worcestershire, then mayonnaise, then dried fish flakes and dried seaweed are sprinkled on top. We skipped a few of those options.
Overall I thought the food was really good. I think Keenan liked it as well, once he wasn't about to wither away from hunger.
Here's something that would never happen in the US...We had each ordered an all-you-can-eat option from the menu not really knowing how large each okonomiyaki portion would be. We ended up only eating 2 okonomiyaki (beef, pork & chicken and 4 kinds of cheeses) and one order of beef, pork & chicken yakisoba. When we went to pay the cashier realized that our individual orders cost less (2,624¥) than the all-you-can-eat price (3,160¥) so she only charged us for what we had. Amazing.