Water

One of my sons saw my two most recent blog posts last night and was impressed that I'd written about food and then toilets. Today's might or might not be so impressive. As I look through my photos I'm struck by a lot of green, but also the prevalence of water.

At church this morning someone asked about our camping trip, especially noting that we got very wet. I pointed out that we really only had particularly two bad episodes with rain, at our first campsite and then our fourth. But water featured in other ways too, we camped next to water or in view of bodies of water several times.

But here is our 15-day camp from the viewpoint of water.

First day: stopped at Naeda falls

 Campsite one: Niigata ken, overlooking Joetsu city

This campsite had a great view, that included the Japan sea from this campsite, especially when it wasn't raining. Alas it rained quite a bit. Our tent leaked when a storm blew in within the first half an hour of setting up and our tarpaulin annex didn't hold up to the wind either. So we moved the tarp over the tent and shifted our kitchen to a more solid location.

 We also packed up in the rain at the end of that two-night stop.

Campsite two: Noto island. 

We drove through rain most of the day to get to this campsite. While setting up it was drizzling. We set up a wet tent because it had been raining when we took it down that morning. I mopped out the inside of the tent before we took our stuff in there. Thankfully we gradually dried out over the next couple of days and our bedding wasn't wet.

We had a water view here too, it's Toyama Bay, off the Japan sea.

We had a dry pack-up on Noto island and spent part of the day then driving around on the Noto peninsula. This is a spot on the wild west coast, again the Japan sea.

Campsite three: Kanazawa hinterland

It was a fairly dry set-up, though I'm pretty sure we had sprinkles at one point soon after set-up and the next morning we had fog. This was probably our least watery campsite, with no natural bodies of water nearby and no water views.

 There was water at the garden we visited in Kanazawa, though.

Beautiful water...

Campsite four: Lake Biwa

Gorgeous lake-side campsite. We gazed and gazed at the changing view. However this is the campsite that we got waterlogged on our first night. It rained hard and three of us were up at around 4am doing adjustments to tarps and bedding. Eventually David and our eldest son were able to stem the growing puddle under the tent, but not before most people got their toes wet inside the tent.

Campsite five: Kii peninsula

We went down this fairly remote peninsula to see Nachi falls, the tallest single-drop falls in Japan, but we weren't camped next to them. But another stream was close-by our tent, to the point where we couldn't tell if it was raining or not. It rained here just after we put our tent up as well! 

Nachi falls. Part of a World Heritage listing.

Campsite six: north of Nagoya

We again camped next to a stream. We also again encountered rain within the first hour of being set-up. This time it was a storm. Thankfully everything remained pretty dry inside the tent, despite a large amount of water being dumped on us in a short period of time. The stream was lots of fun to play in.

It was the rainy season after all...but we really didn't have that bad a time of it, not as bad as it apparently sounded!