Camping trip to the beach

On Friday we came home from a two-night camping trip to the beach near Yokohama. It's the first time we've camped in Kanagawa Prefecture and only the third time next to the ocean (the other two were on the east coast of Hokkaido and on an island on the west coast of Japan). It's the fourth time we've been camping with our friends the Van Druffs.

People have asked us how we find campsites. Our general strategy is to use Google maps, look at an area we're interested in going to and type "camping". Then we seek out the campsites that have websites with sufficient information to make decisions. It generally works a treat.

This time we thought about what might be the warmest place we could go: we thought next to the sea might be more temperate than the mountains at this time of year. And then we looked for a sheltered campsite, knowing that it can be very windy at this time of year.

Well, we're very glad we thought about that last aspect because when we arrived on Wednesday the wind was strong, something like 35-40km/hr. The campsite, however, was sheltered from the ocean breezes by a hill and lots of trees. It was quite calm, although our friends' tent was partially collapsed by the wind in the early hours of our first night. Our tent and "annex" was fine, for which we're very grateful. 

This was the free-camping site. Fun trees and lovely pine-needle covered ground for pitching tents on. Definitely the most tree-ed campsite we've ever camped on.
Great for hammocks!

Tent with annex and the usual array of camping chairs, tables, and boxes containing food plus kitchen and other gear.

Our new second-hand tent.

It was our first time camping in this new tent. It was considerably smaller than our previous tent. Our previous tent died after six years (we'd used it on nearly 30 separate occasions), so last year we bought a new one. We didn't want to buy another 10-man tent because we're already down to two boys at home, but it's also warmer and appears quite sturdy.

It was a pretty simple camp. We left on Wednesday morning, bought lunch at a convenience store on our way there. The campsite was only 52 km from our house, but took nearly two hours to get there (heading south from our house involves going past millions of people).

Most of the afternoon was spent in setting up camp and then getting dinner underway. We finished eating pretty early and our whole family was in bed by around 8.30! Unbelievable. Certainly a great way to relax.

Strolling with some of our nine-person crew. 

Lots of concrete to protect the shoreline.

The river mouth. We believe on a good day you can see Mt Fuji from here.

The sole cherry blossom tree near the campsite!

A curious pigeon.

We had a lot of fun with the hammocks.

We tried to see the sunset on Thursday, but this was as good as it got!

On Thursday we were very slow in getting moving and breakfast morphed into brunch. Our camping companions were tired, having had a broken night with their tent issues and the rest of us were happy to sleep in. After we'd finished the meal and cleaning up, we went for a stroll westwards along the coast. Thankfully sometime before we got up the wind had died down. The temperate was in the high teens and quite comfortable. 

The campsite is on a river mouth and sandwiched between a small park, the beach, and—believe it or not—a sewerage treatment plant! No, it wasn't smelly! But the area wasn't particularly pretty either. (We're Australian, beach-snobs, any beach that isn't as pure-looking as our beaches doesn't rate highly.) However, the kids spent much time playing with the sand and rocks. It was too cold to tempt anyone to get into the water, but we spent a lot of time looking at it.

After lunch everyone gravitated to a hammock or chair or bed and a natural siesta happened. After that David and I went for a stroll the other way along the coast—down to where a number of surfers in full wetsuits were waiting for waves. There weren't many waves, so there seemed to be a lot of waiting!

This is the "beach" adjacent to the campsite. The boys enjoyed playing around in this protected area.

The small fireplace where we cooked (we had two of these).

Walking east, away from the river mouth we found this surfing beach. A bit further along is a famous swimming beach and 10 km away is a touristy island called Enoshima.
This area is known for its connections with Hawaii and is even billed as
Japan's birthplace of surfing.

Dinner on Thursday involved a lot of fire and intensive work by a number of people cooking over 2 kg of meat on two small fireplaces, with root veggies in foil packets, followed by my favourite camp dessert: Choco marshmallow banana boats. The one drawback of this campsite was that we couldn't cook with our own gear near our tents. We had to book camp kitchens. They weren't far from our campsite, maybe 50m, but still it was annoying and didn't encourage lingering over the fire after dinner.

The "cooking area". We booked two of these, which included a table, benches,
and small fireplace each.

The two tents with the "annex" or common area in the middle.

Entertainment on Thursday night was provided by a team of about 16 small boys, staying overnight with their soccer coach. There were only three showers for us all, and they were unisex, opening onto the walkway between our tents and the cooking area. So we had to walk past repeatedly while the coaches tried to get all these boys showered—two at a time! It was entertaining ;-).

The next morning we had to be up early, as we were supposed to be out of there by 10am, and we actually managed to do that and got back home by early afternoon.

These are all the places we've camped in Japan: 26 separate
campsite, representing 32 times we've put up a tent!

Overall it was a great camping trip. Only the third in 18 months (we only managed to camp once in 2018). After only two nights away we came back feeling relaxed. It was good to go with friends too, as that helped us all to be on "good behaviour" and also, we all had people to hang out with who weren't family (especially helpful for the kids).