So, after a fairly relaxing four-hour drive (three hours plus stops) in beautiful weather, we arrived at the lavishly-named Omaki Onsen Spa Garden "Waen" (おまき温 泉スパガーデン和園). I actually never bothered to parse that full name until now... here's what it means: "Omaki" is the name of the area with a few natural hot springs (onsen). "Spa Garden" is their description to try to sell you on it being a nice place. All those are adjectives to the real name, "Waen", whose characters in this case mean "Peaceful Garden".

Anyway, the attraction for us was that it was in an area [...]

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I'm really swamped with Lightroom plugin stuff this week, so I just don't have the energy to address all the photos from our recently-completed short snowy New Year's trip, so I'll dip into the photo archives for some low-hanging fruit.

I attended an event at Anthony's school in November, and noticed his drawing on the wall, of his favorite event from his school Sports Day the previous month: tamaire (玉入れ). Teams stand in an area littered with beanbags and try to get as many into a basket held high up on a pole before time runs out. This event had [...]

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The trip we came back from yesterday could be summed up with one word: Snow. The first day (a travel day) was clear and bright.... and that was pretty much the last of the sun we saw for the rest of the trip. This was my first photo on Day 2.

Posts with photos from this trip:

Back Home After a Short Trip First Taste of Snow on Our New Year’s Trip Driving Snow Some Kind of Snow & Face Picture Introduction to a Snowy Gokayama Village Japan’s Deep-Rooted Ethos of Fire Prevention Rosy Cheeks Shutter Speed’s Effect on Falling [...]
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We just returned from a four-day New Year's outing. 550+ emails are waiting in my mail queue. At least that many pictures in my camera waiting for me to process.

We don't travel all that often, but when we do, wow, it always seems to be to a place that's photogenic, or provides for interesting stories, or both. Will have many blog posts for months to come from this trip...

Continued here...

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We're preparing for a short trip into snow country, packing warm coats and gloves and such for a few days of what will mostly be Anthony snow play. I'm quite looking forward to it, but am also reminded that our New Year's trip a year ago was to the warmer climate of the Okinawan mainland, staying at the Atta Terrace Hotel.

The trip was just two nights, yet among the half dozen posts I wrote soon after, I wasn't able to get around to posting anything from the third day, and barely touched on what we did the second. So [...]

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