The First Day of Our Pilgrimage

So, now we four are in Shikoku, the fourth largest island in Japan, which is located in the south-western part of our country. Our boss, one of my coworkers, me and a young part-time tutor of our cram school flew here and started our pilgrimage this morning.
It is called "shikoku-henro" （四国遍路） or "o-henro-san" （お遍路さん）. We should make a tour of 88 temples in Shikoku by turns as a kind of ascetic practices. All the temples are related to Kukai （空海）, a famous Buddhist priest from Shikoku who first introduced esoteric Buddhism to Japan.
Some people make the tour on foot, but it takes a lot of time and it also costs a lot. So we four are doing it by car during our vacation.

Today was the first day and we visited seventeen temples in total. That was better than we had expected.
One of them was Shouzan temple （焼山寺）, the twelfth temple, which lies in the mountains far from the city area. The path to and from it is said to be the hardest part in the whole route. As we are using the rental car, it was much easier to get to the temple, but we could see almost nothing but the trees on our way to it. It was a winding road, and most of us got carsick. As we were also very tired, we felt sleepy and fell into a doze. That prevented us from getting sick too badly. The problem was that the driver, our boss, also felt sleepy while he was driving. He opened the window, slapped his own face and said that he needed chewing gum.
But at last, he beat Morpheus without gum. That's why it is possible for me to be in our hotel and be writing the diary now.

In the evening, after we arrived at our hotel in Tokushima city, we walked around the hotel and looked for the place to have dinner. We hadn't had a meal after we started in the rental car shop near the airport this morning and we were very hungry.
After walking for some time, we noticed it was going to rain, so we entered a sushi restaurant which happened to be there. Fortunately, we found it a very good restaurant. It was run by an old couple and sushi served by them were so delicious and rather cheap. We also enjoyed the witty owner-cook's chat there.