The day I got back from camping, Fumie happened to hear from a taxi driver about a small out-of-the-way shrine not too far away that had a nice bloom of wisteria (or fuji – 藤 – in Japanese), so yesterday afternoon we made the 45 minute drive to Sandai Temple in Kusatsu to check it out.

I guess wisteria is normally a climbing plant, but here they have them dangling from horizontal trellises. They were mostly purple/lavender, but there were some light pink ones as well.

There were a lot of big bumblebees among the flowers (two can be seen [...]

It seems that my cellphone somehow dropped out of my pocket while scootering home today. Lucky for me, a kind stranger found it and called the "HOME" entry in the address book: she told me that she'd found my phone before I even realized I'd lost it.

It's not fun to lose a phone. The last time that I lost my phone (which was also the first time I lost my phone) it was a huge hassle to have to get a new one, new plan, re-enter data, etc. Yuck. (It turns out, though, that the phone was just hiding [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]