Anthony and I visited Zak and his 3-and-a-half-year-old son Gen for a day of play, including a trip to the same park in Otsu City that Anthony and Monet played in last week (that I mentioned on my Overwhelmed: an Embarrassment of Riches post).

The two boys spent most of the time playing in the water.

At this point they started to walk away on the path (a path that leads down to a busy street), so I yelled down for them to come back. Three-year-old Gen, being the three-year-old that he is, turned heel and started running away, so I took off down after him.

I was carrying my camera (the non-small Nikon D200 mounted with a big Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 zoom and a 1.7× teleconverter) all attached to my 8-foot-long monopod, yet I still ran perhaps the fastest I've run in the last 20 years: the GPS unit in my pocket recorded a maximum speed of 29kph. For reference, a four-minute mile is 24kph. (But, of course, I didn't run for a whole mile, and I was also running downhill )

On the way back, Anthony showed me some chestnuts he'd been carrying throughout the water play....

You can see them in his hand in this picture from earlier when he and Gen were playing at the playground and Anthony suggested that they go play in the water in the first place...

Zak must have got some nice pictures himself, as he brought along his own focus puller...