Day 8 - Akan National Park - June 19

Our drive to the lake district took us about 3 hours. It was another gorgeous drive through the mountains and hills and forest. We had stopped at a seico mart for some pastries for breakfast. We checked into our hotel around 1:00. It is located right on the shores of Lake Kussharo and we have a beautiful view of the lake from our room. There is a coin op laundry facility here in our hotel so we took care of some laundry first, then drove into the nearby town of Teshikagawa for lunch. I had more ramen, the boys had some meat/tofu/gravy over rice. It was very filling so we ended up skipping dinner. It was a late lunch anyway. Then we drove to a couple lookouts of Lake Mashu. It is said to be the clearest lake in the world, and no one is allowed to go down to the water. It was a very beautiful lake, but it’s hard to see how clear it is from way up above from some look outs. The drive along the shores were windy and foresty and Lake Mashu is a at pretty high elevation so we saw several nice views of the surrounding valleys and volcanos. Our next stop was at a volcano called Iozan and it had several sulphuric steam vents that we were able to walk around. It was such a cool place. The smell and the steam started to irritate Dave’s eyes so we couldn’t stay very long. On our drive back to the hotel, we stopped along the shores of Lake Kussharo for a little while at sunset. Back at the hotel, Mike showed us several videos of him and Elder Strachan that we hadn’t seen yet that were super silly. We also watched Cinderella and Blended.