Photos from our two-week holiday

It's been quiet here over the last couple of weeks because I've been away with my family on our summer holidays. In contrast to last year we didn't go to numerous camping sites, so I had less to blog about. In addition to technological difficulties making blogging hard, I decided to take a complete break. It was nice, though I have to admit I was feeling a bit bored by the end of the time.

I've hit the ground running today as I've tried to gather up the threads of various responsibilities that I let go during our time away. But I'll share a some photos from our holidays with you as a means of getting started again. These are all unedited photos from my "big" camera.

Our first two nights were spent with a friends who live on the west coast of Japan. They took us to a park where we wandered around for an hour or two.

 Walking. The temperature was perfect, high 20s (Celsius).

One of the ferns in the park.

From there we drove north along the coast to a small, historical town. We stayed in an old ryokan (Japanese inn). The area has had hot spring baths for 1,300 years! It was everything I imagined an old ryokan would be: poky (building), intimate, friendly hostess.

The next day we continued driving north for a while. It's usually hard to find places to stop to see the Japanese coastline, but this day we happened upon one and I made an impulsive decision to stop the car. We all got out and went for a ramble on a track along the coast.

Then we turned inland to find Lake Tazawa and our campsite.

We were not lake-side but had a spectacular secluded spot up the hill a little. You can just spy the lake on the left of this photo of one of our sunsets.

This campsite was amazing. Usually campsites in Japan don't have grass sites.

The lake-side beach. We enjoyed several hours over two days at this inland beach.

A rather fat bug. Caterpillar?

The green was fantastic. I found this wall a bit further round the lake.

We hired bikes and rode round the lake. David and our eldest did the whole lake: 20km. The younger two chose to ride a shorter distance, but we still covered 13km along this road. So gorgeous.

The campsite had two pet rabbits. They are called "Jumbo" and apparently are a traditional type of rabbit for the area. There is an annual Jumbo Rabbit festival for them in the prefecture!

Dragon fly on the tent fly rope!

Then we drove east, then south, then east again, finally arriving at the east coast.

Here we stayed ten nights at a recently renovated OMF cabin. We were very lazy!

You didn't have to look hard to see evidence of the giant tsunami from 6 ½ years ago. Just down the hill they are rebuilding a large wall to prevent future tsunamis from invading the land.

This is the nob of land that we were perched on. The tsunami didn't reach up to the various cabins perched up there. In a later post I'll explain how it came to be that more than 50 cabins belonging to missionaries are on this and the nearby nob.

Enough of a view to see the ocean. It was a very peaceful place to spend the second half of our holidays. Though I missed the exhilaration of camping, the peace we enjoyed with our teens was probably worth it. We played hours and hours of board games (no WiFi or TV or DVD player). We can't remember the last time we spent 10 days of a holiday in one place, so it was probably very good for us.