What are your summer plans?

Seven weeks until school finishes here. Wow! Where has the year gone?

I can say the same about the fact that my youngest turns eight this week! And that I'm walking around as a 40 year old. How do these things happen so fast?

From GoogleMaps. The blue "pins" are where
we've camped so far in Japan. In our trip in
June-July we'll add several pins in the far north
and east of Japan.

So now we're "working hard" to prepare for our holidays. This year we're staying put in
Japan, but we're not staying in Tokyo the whole time.

At the end of June, OMF, our organisation, has its national conference in Hokkaido, the big island at the top of Japan. So, we're headed north. However, instead of just going up for the week and then coming back again, we've decided to take the ferry with our car and camping gear and make the most of visiting this more rural island. It is the place we first called home in Japan, yet because we had very young children and were generally exhausted throughout the four years we worked and studied up there, we saw little of the place outside of Sapporo, the big smoke.

So, we've been busy searching for camp sites, and figuring out a schedule. It's going to be about two weeks of camping in about seven different places, plus staying in someone's house, and then at the end, a few days (to recover) in a cabin by the beach near Sendai. We'll be going to the far north and far eastern points of the island (and hence, Japan). It's been so exciting, looking at camp sites online—the scenery is amazing.

It's going to be an entirely different looking holiday to last year's trip to the centre of Australia! And although it was winter in Australia and will be summer here, I think that we might be colder here (at least in the middle of the day) than we were in Australia! But we'll get back just in time for the worst of a Tokyo summer, so I guess that will make up for it.

On top of that we're planning a much shorter camping trip in August with some friends of our to this campsite, our favourite (and the cheapest) campsite.

Other summer plans? The younger two have a week-long camp not long after school finishes. They're both very excited about that.

Our eldest is hoping to join a Japanese wrestling club from mid-May to continue through the summer. It will be a boost to his skills, and give him the opportunity to satisfy that craving for more opportunities to wrestle people his own weight. We're still seeking the right club for him, but hopefully will settle this in the next couple of weeks. I'm excited to see him pursuing a passion and getting some exercise during those long 11 weeks of holidays. Hopefully it will be a boost to his Japanese skills and confidence too.

David is planning to go to a work conference in Hong Kong at the end of July for four days (or five, once you add in travelling). This is preparation for a new course in statistics that he's teaching next school year.

So, they're our basic big-picture summer plans. In the midst of that I'll have a magazine to get out and another one to continue to edit. We're hoping to have our annual editorial planning meeting in August too, not because we'll be bored, but because one of our editors lives in Kyoto and isn't up this way very often, but she will be in August.

So, those are our plans. Do you have some big plans for later in the year? Do share!