Picking up my "Camping with Anthony" story from after our early-morning walk on Day 2....

The campground is on a cliff overlooking part of Kotobikihama (northern Kyoto Prefecture, Japan), a large beach more than a mile long, with many distinct sections. We spent the rest of the morning, and the early part of the afternoon, exploring, but it eventually came time to get wet.

Nearest the campground was a section of wide beach fronted by rocky outcroppings....

( Anthony is right of center )

In the picture above, you can see Anthony sitting in a small stream that's cutting through [...]

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Picking up my "Camping with Anthony" story (about my camping trip with Anthony to Kotobikihama beach, in northern Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) from after the end of Day 1....

On the second day, the sun rose at 5:07am, and, unfortunately, that means that we did too.

We decided to talk a walk along a path to a big hill we could see along the coast, stopping by a big beach in between that the path dipped down to.

As I mentioned yesterday, the amount of yellow pollen dust that the pine trees produced was staggering. Maybe some clever bees enlisted a [...]

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I've been so overwhelmed with built-up stuff to do since returning from camping with Anthony that I've only just started really looking in detail through the photos I took, and came across this interesting shot. At the end of the second day, Anthony was out on some rocks just off the beach and playing with some new friends, and I was with them and enjoying the sunset and conversation with their mom.

I then noticed this bird flying by and something seemed very odd about it, so I quickly snapped the lopsided picture you see above. (I seem to have [...]

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We started our camping trip last week, May 1st, heading out at about 11am for what should have been about a 3.5 hour drive. Unfortunately, there was some kind of parade that caused the road I happen to have taken to be intermittently closed, turning roads in eastern Kyoto into a parking lot. It took 20 minutes to go half a mile. Not a good start.

Having gotten past that, I thought things would be smooth sailing, but quickly ran into heavy traffic again. I took some side streets and eventually got through the city. What should have been 15 [...]

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I mentioned the other day that I was going to take Anthony camping for the first time, and I did. We just got back this afternoon.

I'll write more about the whole experience another day (one that I don't wake up at 5am), but the location was a campground on a cliff overlooking Kotobikihama beach (map) about three and a half hours away by car, in the far north-western corner of Kyoto prefecture.

I took the picture above on our first night, about half an hour after sunset. It was so dark that I could barely see anything (including how [...]

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