A summer holiday

We got back from our two-week summer holiday on Monday and I've been working hard all week to catch up on editing and writing work that was waiting for me. Therefore I haven't blogged about our holidays or anything else, for that matter, for some time (also worked hard before we left so that I could leave my computer and email packed away for the whole two weeks).

This holiday was sorely needed. It's the first time in two years that we've really stopped for two whole weeks. We did little travel and no socialising. We applied ourselves to relaxing as much as possible. Our days were filled with reading, playing games, jigsaw puzzles, Minecraft (two boys), sleeping, and movies. The latter we did every night (mostly at home, but did go once to the theatre). We also walked to a park down the road several times to play Park Golf...but more about that soon.

I've turned this into something of a "slide show" with a couple of dozen photos, text inserted in-between, so that you can see some of what we did and saw. 

The drive west/north-west out of Tokyo via motorways pretty quickly becomes dominated by mountains and green. It's always a welcome sight.

This is the holiday house that OMF owns and where we stayed. Our apartment was the top floor, which included a loft, so the top two layers of windows here. It was fantastic being able to feast our eyes on farms and the mountains beyond (when we could, they were covered in cloud a lot of the time). 

The grass is trimmed beautifully due to the hard work of David, who spent quite a number of hours with the brush cutter (the property extends down the hill on the other side of the house and the grass was over six-feet tall down there).

Our dining table looked out upon the fields and we watched as the farmer and his wife plowed, planted, and sprayed some of this land (the latter two tasks by hand).

The park 700m from our house is smallish, but a beauty. It has some playground equipment, this pyramid, and a 32-hole mallet/park golf course that we did twice over four days.

Not the greatest photo, but I stuck my finger in to show how small this frog was. We found several of these during our golfing.

One of the features of the park is this picturesque bridge. It doesn't lead you to much, just the rest of the golf course, but it's lovely to look at.

Some of the golf course. The big feature of park/mallet golf is that it is largely in a natural park environment with lots of natural obstacles. This is really a mallet golf course (though we really aren't sure of the differences between the two, except that park golf is mostly a Hokkaido sport). The clubs are different, but we used both (having our own park golf clubs that missionaries gave us a few years back).

One day we walked down to the park and it was a bit cool and rainy, I realised that not only did I have a teal shirt and jacket on, but my umbrella also was too, and this teal-coloured shed was too much to resist!

The road past the house is a bit of a sealed track and is bordered closely by bushland. Just gorgeous green-therapy for our Tokyo-singed eyes.

Not a great view for the camera through the fly screen, but we could watch the sun set every day from our living/dining area. Most days we only caught a short glimpse, because cloud was the predominant feature of the skies.

 It always amuses us, when we're in the Japanese countryside, so see how many of these utility trucks there are. It's the standard vehicle ("ubiquitous" is the word that comes to mind) for anyone on the land and also the managers of campgrounds. They are the equivalent of the Australian "ute" but much smaller and not so "cool".

We slept on the floor in a traditional tatami room. However, the futon were a bit old and my neck didn't appreciate it. I ended up piling up a lot of bedding in order to get a good night sleep and help the headaches stay away.

One of my favourite spots, with key pursuits in view: cross-stitch, a game, a jigsaw, book to read, ice coffee, and TV. And as with all the windows in this apartment: we could see green!

One afternoon we went to a nearby town to play ten-pin bowling, buy shoes at an outlet mall, check out the Lego shop (a family tradition in this area), and finished up with afternoon tea at a coffee shop. A lovely afternoon overall, even if I did terribly at bowling, others did really well. I'm surprised at how hard it is to get teenagers to enjoy a family outing. I didn't expect that when I had younger kids. They weren't even keen about going away on holidays, however, it wasn't as bad as they expected.

This shop was next to traffic lights that we stopped at a number of times. We never went in, but the name of the shop makes you want to! Maybe when we go back in December...

 More park photos: there were some gorgeous fungi around if you kept your eyes open, but they were generally small.

We walked past this pile of logs every time we walked to the park. I loved the pattern!

Side view of the neat stack.

This was the most fun puzzle we've done in a long time. 100 very quirky chickens and a worm to find. There are more in this series, though the company doesn't sell them anymore, I'd love to get my hands on one or more!

Another frog.

 

 One afternoon our youngest and I had a baking afternoon. He made cinnamon rolls and I made bread rolls for a BBQ dinner. The aromas in the house!

And finally, a screenshot to show you where we were. We were about 900m above sea level, just a bit cooler than on the plain, and only a couple of hours from home. We slept beautifully at night.

Maybe you're wondering why a mission would own a holiday house? To start with, Japanese people don't take long holidays. Two weeks is unheard of—I've been asked, "What would you do?" Therefore they don't have affordable self-catering accommodation for this sort of holiday. So, we missonaries find it difficult to take long, affordable holidays. Our mission organisation owning and maintaining holidays houses makes it affordable. We are ever so thankful.