The interior of the cave is built up as well.  There are a bunch of platforms over the water, and stairs in the cave that take you way up into the upper open areas of the cave that allow you to look down into the pools, showing the clear blue water quite well.  Only thing is the stairs are super narrow and steep and wet, making them very tricky.  Pretty crazy they let you walk through it without any guides or anything; must be harder to sue in Japan.  In addition to the scary stairwells, there are also points along the cave where the path is very short, and you have to duck to continue - on these places, they attached floor mats to give your head a little cushioning if you do hit it.  They also have some signs throughout the cave.  When they can, they put the signs on power boxes and such -  they are very efficient conscious people.  They use anything they can for whatever they can.  We also saw one bat do a fast flyby.  Overall, the cave was pretty impressive.

After caving, we walked over to the local campground next store to the cave and got one of the three cabins there.  It was only 3100 yen, so it was pretty affordable…we go over to our cabin and find calling it a cabin is being generous.  It is a more a nice shed.  It is small, square room with a tatami mat floor and a couple of futon mattresses.  In their defense, that is how they sleep in their homes (or used to).  So, not much to the cabin, but it was cool.  Although, it was pretty cold in there.  Then, being Sunday night at 5:30, we figured we could go have a nice dinner to make for a great day.  We walked back to the cave to see if anything was open there, but all the little food shops at the cave entrance closed at 5pm when the cave closed.  So, we drove the mile or so into the town to find a restaurant.  And, believe it or not, everywhere in the town to eat was closed as well.  They didn't even have a Lawsons or Circle-K.  They did have a couple of small grocery stores, so we went in and got romaine lettuce, salad dressing, some pepper, a can of tuna, and some Choco-pies.  Turned out to be a decent meal - good dressing and lettuce.  But frustrating that we didn't get anything hot to eat, especially as it was getting pretty cold. 

Next day, we drove up to find two other caves we had seen listed on one of our maps.  Ryusendo cave is very popular and known -  we went to find Akkado Cave and Tsugari Cave.  They are a little more off the beaten path.  So, we wind our way north looking for the caves, which is an adventure in of itself considering even in our good map book they only number the main roads, and we were not on any main roads at this point.  Other than that, you have to count the number of roads you pass and do a bit of guesswork to find where you are going.  So, after a few tries, we found the road the other two caves had to be on.  We drove by them once, and then Jenn spotted the first cave.  It was just off a river with a pretty big opening.  Only thing was it was closed off.  Must have been closed for the season.  One thing we did find is more and more torii gates everywhere.  They signify a Shinto shrine further along the path.  They have shrines everywhere, of all sizes.  Small one with a single shed-sized building.  Large complexes with beautiful buildings.  In the area, we found a few smaller ones just in the most random areas.

Then, to find Akkado Cave.  Jenn also spotted the opening to that one back near the tiny town right off the larger highway.  It was open (and also 1000 yen per)  But, it was obviously less built up and less visited than Ryusendo.  It had a tiny little dirt parking lot, a small gift shop, and small handwritten sign telling the fees.  So we pay and are about to go in, when they hand us two hardhats.  So, despite being less visited, you do get head protection.  Like Ryusendo, the tours are self-guided, which is cool.  The hardhats are great, in that the cave had many smaller opening to walk under, and this cave didn't have any floor mats put up on the smaller openings.  This cave is over 12000m long.  You only get to see about 700m, but that is still a bit.  It did not have any pooled water like Ryusendo, but it had tons of stalactite and stalagmite formations.  It also had bats, and one bat kept flying by our heads - he did 4 or 5 fly-by passes of us.  The best part of this cave is that in addition to the abundant florescent lights in the cave, they also piped in classical music throughout the cave.  I guess it lessons the claustrophobia?  Either way, it was pretty humorous.

After exploring Akkado Cave, we headed back north up the coast, making our way back towards Misawa.  Nearing the coast, we saw signs for a Shinto shrine, and passed under a ginormous Torii Gate, so we had to find this shrine and check it out.  The larger torii gate, the more impressive the shrine.  After driving in circles a few times, we ended up at what we thought was the top of a hill where they had another huge torii gate, and a scenic hilltop shrine area.  It had a main temple, lots of other structures, and a path that led up a hill behind the temple.  It also had one of the cartoonish maps of the area, showing a shrine at the top of a path.  The path didn't look too long, so we tried the real path heading up the hill.  The real path, however, turned out to be a lot longer than it looked. 

We headed down the mountain, back to the Delica, and headed out, although, we did take a second to take a great picture of the huge torii gates at the shrine entrance.  Along the way, we crossed over more interesting bridges, and saw some more great coastline.  We spotted a resort with a cool mascot - a surfing fish.  We will definitely have to go back and check out the surf at a future date.  After that, headed back to Misawa.  Great trip.