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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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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Yesterday afternoon, prior to the Pleasant Day Along the Kamo River, I had to kill an hour with Anthony near his school. We decided to go with a classmate, Mizuki-chan, across the street to the grounds of Kyoto's old imperial palace...

While they played, I and the camera noticed some things...

At one point they played a game similar to what American kids might do with a turkey wishbone. Pine needles tend to fall in pairs, so they found old dried ones on the ground, hooked the two together, then pulled. The holder of the pair that doesn't break wins.

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