Finishing up the year with joy

We've had some cold days and my office,
which gets no sun this time of year, is a 
chilly place. It's a bit hard to see, but in this
photo from Friday I had a blanket on my lap
and a heated mat under my feet, as
well as the electric heater behind me.

The last fortnight has been pretty hectic. First our first grandchild was born, then, before we'd had much time to process that, two days later we were neck-deep into running a wrestling meet at school, an intense, exhausting event.

And we really didn't stop from there. A usual full Sunday and then straight back into work for the next five days. Lots of good things, just not much breathing room in the middle. Thankfully we've remained healthy, school finished on Friday and then we had Saturday as a proper day off. 

This morning we had a visitor from the Australian OMF office–not something that we often have received in our years here, but it was a blessing to spend a few hours with this colleague who we'd barely met before today. 

This afternoon we're finishing off various home chores and a few editing/email matters for me too. Tomorrow afternoon we head to Australia to meet our new grandchild and fully immerse ourselves in that reality for 10 days or so. I guess I should do some packing soon too.

Wrestling meet admin fun. High-decibel, high-stress
workplace for 12 hours!

It's amazing to think we're coming up to nearly two years since our last child left home (in February). There'll be time for reflecting as I write my traditional last blog post for the year in a couple of weeks, but even now, as work starts to shut down for Christmas and New Year, I can't help but feel a little thoughtful. When talking with our visitor this morning, I said that we felt fairly content with how things were at present. He grabbed hold of that word "content" and was glad to hear it. And yes, it's true. We don't know what the future will hold, but for today, we're content in general with where things are at.

Yesterday David led the service at church. The theme was joy and David lead out with the fact that it was exactly (yesterday) 25 years since we first landed in Japan. [I also played the piano for worship, which was a real joy, because it's been a long time since I got to play Christmas music for worship in a church.] 

I realise that I'd shared about the anniversary in our prayer letter last month, but not here. Here is what I wrote in our prayer letter:

Here's the link to an article I wrote for our Australian OMF magazine about the anniversary: https://omf.org/au/one-day-at-a-time-25-years-in-japan/

We don't want your praise for this achievement, but I do want to share the story in a way that gives praise to God for sustaining us here this long. The reasons why people don't get to stay that long on the mission field are many and could easily have applied to us at several points in the last quarter of a century! We're thankful for the opportunities that we've had and the glory goes to God.

I'm not taking my computer with us tomorrow for this short time with our kids in Australia, so I may not get to write another blog post until after Christmas...though a short grandma-type post might be possible using my phone! In any case, I hope you have a blessed Christmas time with loved ones, whatever that looks like in your life.

P.S. And for those who asked: no, I will not be sharing our granddaughter's name or photo on this blog, just as I've never shared my kids names or photos in this public space.

A stroll in Sapporo

So I'm in Sapporo until tomorrow. It's a curious place for a Queenslander: where winter is the norm and spring/summer/autumn all together last only half the year (if you say that maximums below 16˚C are "winter"). Even now, when everyone is celebrating spring, the temperatures are below average for what we know as winter in Brisbane.

It's a place shaped by its extreme winters and you can tell that just from walking around. I've posted photos below to see if you can "read" the evidence and posted them below, but first, some flowers.

It's about 1,000 km north of Tokyo. So coming here at this time of year feels like stepping back a month or so. The flowers that were out in Tokyo in March are coming out here now. I went for a walk during our lunch the other day and snapped some gorgeous plants amidst the grey of the streets.

Can you name all of these?

And now, for some evidence that winter is harsh. The average number of snowy days in this city is 132, with nearly 6m of snow falling each year!

Can you tell what evidence of severe winters you can see in these photos? (I've put the answers in captions, but you can try to guess before you scroll down to the caption).

Not too much of this left at this time of year, but plants and
small trees are often wrapped up or bound up in
some way to protect them from the weight of heavy snow.

Double doors at the entrance to a house. So that residents can shake off
snow before entering, and also keep "outside' thing still undercover (see the bike here).
These glass doors are often sliding, so that if a lot of snow has fallen during the night, you can still get out the front door in the morning.

Marks like these are common on roads and footpaths.
They are where the snow ploughs have gone a little too "deep"
in their ploughing.

Side view of the above garages. You don't see garages like this
much in Tokyo. An uncovered carpark is a nightmare in a
climate where it snows 6m in a winter, you spend a lot of time
shovelling out the car (and most people have one here). Not
to mention scrapping off the windows so that you can see out.
We still carry a scraper in our car, a habit from our days in
Sapporo, where you often had to scrape your windows even
after a short stop at the grocery store.
The big corrugations here are essential to bear up under heavy
snow building up on top.

Covered external stairwells at entrance. Shovelling stairs is not fun,
nor is negotiating them when they are only partly shovelled.

Can you see the ladder? For shovelling the roof!

The next three photos aren't so much about excess snow, but just showing how spacious Hokkaido is. It definitely feels different to Tokyo. SO much space, so few people.

But wide footpaths are essential for snow piles. In winter the snow ploughed off the road gets piled here. Small ploughs keep some essential footpaths clear. But they really only enjoy the width in the non-snowy months (about seven months of the year).

Sticky snow

From Monday. The naked twigs on our backyard tree were decorated
beautifully during the snowfall.

Last Monday it snowed in Tokyo. Usually that is a rather non-event. It snows and either barely makes it to the ground, or melts soon after. Occasionally it sticks around. This year is one of the "occasions". It snowed about 30 cm in our area, which is quite a lot for this region. The complicating factor is that the temperature then went south and stayed there. It's barely went above zero between Wednesday and yesterday. As a result the snow has stuck, especially in the shade. But it is no longer nice, fluffy snow. It is slick, slippery ice that is hard to remove from the roads and paths it has covered.

Our backyard on Monday.

This photo I took on my way home from church today.

It is one of the riverside paths we frequently ride.

I've stayed off my bike all week. Because of the way the streets are configured around our house, it is difficult to find a non-shaded street to get out to of our local residential area and therefore a non-snow-covered street. So I've walked or driven. But many Tokyo-ites are very dependent on bikes and it has been rather alarming to see even elderly Japanese people riding on ice. A decidedly risky endeavour, although walking may not be much safer as the ice is very slick in places.

But today, to get to church, we decided to brave our bikes and David and I took a rather round-about route to find clear paths. These three photos below I took on my way home, but the paths aren't ones I rode today.

Another photo from my ride home today.

One of the two "rivers" in our city. I rode on the path along the
right-hand side, the side that got the sun during the week). It was
mostly clear of ice.

This photo is of one of the houses behind our house. I took the photo yesterday, but it looks pretty much the same today. We've been watching the snow slide of this roof since Monday. Any bets on how long it will take for this to fall?

Anyway, I'm hoping that we get some higher temperatures this week (up to 8C is forecast) and that all this cold, slippery stuff will go away.

Getting traction

It's another "getting traction by writing about the past couple of days" post.

Last week
Last week was a flurry of meetings and aside from that I mostly only got to the most urgent of things here at my desk. Lots of excitement as we ramp up towards transitioning our eldest to Australia next month and the rest of us to Australia in July. But enough to de-rail me from my usual fast, but somewhat efficient pace. It was like my brain had gone into manic mode and I found sleep difficult: either I struggled to calm down enough to get to sleep at the start of the night or work up part way into the night and struggled to get back to sleep.

Ah, the fun of having other wrestling mums to share the joy. So much
better than doing it alone!

Saturday
Then came Saturday. It was a usual Saturday for this time of the year—we got up early and went to a wrestling meet. But it was a slightly unusual wrestling meet, with the middle schoolers joining the high schoolers for a joint meet for the first time we've ever experienced (in seven years of being on this wrestling circuit). That meant they expanded to three mats running during the day, one mat in an adjacent room. So even though our team was small (only seven wrestlers in total), we often missed seeing them wrestle.

It was a fun, but frenetic day. I loved being back in a bigger group of parents and hanging out all day with them was fun. But the gym is an echoey one and eight hours of that was exhausting.

Watching friends watch their son introduced for his regional final.
I was sitting in their seat the last two years. It was nice not to have that
personal pressure, but rather to support others.

It was great to see our middle-school son have success. He won all three of his bouts and got gold in his weight bracket. Great encouragement for him as he's struggled in the last year or two a little with injury and "a lot of knowledge but not enough practise applying the knowledge and not enough strength to do what he wants to do".

It was also exciting to cheer for the son of our friends. We've camped with them and spent numerous other times with them (sharing meals, sharing cars, attending sporting events). It was great to see their son excel on Saturday, even if he did give us a bit of a scare in the first half of his finals match by being way behind in points.

I talked, or felt like I talked, for 12 hours! Certainly the only time I wasn't surrounded by people was in the toilet cubicle. Talking over the noise on top of cheering loudly for certain wrestlers meant my voice was strained at the end of the day.

I loved being with other parents, and was able to touch base with a couple of mums from other school that I already have an acquaintance with. Sharing the disappointment with one of them as her son lost his final.

I had an opportunity to sit with another mum-friend in an unusual situation. I'm not ready to write about it here (and I may never, because I want to respect her privacy), but it was an opportunity to have a ministry of presence to someone in need. She described me as being a real help to her and that was a great encouragement, though really I was just available to her need to have someone to sit with in a crowd and listen and I didn't do a lot other than that (and answer/ask questions).

Sunday
It was a much-needed rest day. Church as usual in the morning and then nothing much else for the rest of the day. I did sneak some baking in later in the afternoon.

Monday
This was a staff work day (or student-free day, as we used to call it in Australia), so the students were at home and got up late. David went in for a leadership team meeting and then did other teacherly work at his school desk in the afternoon. I took the opportunity to get up a bit later too (having lost sleep last week, I figured this was looking after myself in a way that I needed to).

The big elephant yesterday was that snow was forecast. Our eldest's job was to go into school to help with snow clearing and he hung around until it looked like it had started to "stick" to the ground and pile up late morning (it began snowing around 10). He worked there until dark last night and came home wet and tired.

We also had an overnight guest last night. One of the couple who we visited at the end of November. He was supposed to have a meeting at school this morning, but it got cancelled last night once they realised the extent of the snowfall. Alas he'd already made it to our house for the night, so he stayed and went home this morning after the craziness of rush-hour.

With boys at home and people coming and going yesterday I didn't get much traction on computer work and that was frustrating. But I did have some good quality time with boys. Two conversations particularly that I wouldn't normally expect during a usual week. One was especially important regards how the younger two are processing their big (and favourite) brother leaving home in just two weeks.

Tuesday
Well it snowed well into the evening and this morning we woke up to a winter wonderland. There was a good 20cm of snow on our front doorstep and I went out after breakfast to shovel our entry and the piece of road that functions as a footpath. It is all on the northern side of the house so doesn't get sun at this time of year. From experience, if it isn't shovelled as soon as is practical, it tends to melt on a warmish day such as we have today (around 6C) and then freezes to the road as the sun goes down, turning into slick ice that is hard to remove in future days.

The advantage of shovelling is that you get to meet your neighbours. Though one of my neighbours gave up shovelling almost as soon as she got out there. She rightly said that there really is nowhere to put the snow (our road only just accommodates two cars passing slowly). I shifted our snow slightly to the edge, piling it against our wall and behind the telephone pole that sits in the gutter (our front wall sits on top of the gutter, there is no verge at all). I also shovelled a short path at my elderly neighbour's entry (the one who is fanatical about gutter-sweeping).

Our overnight guest left mid-morning and I've been trying to get some traction on my computer-based work. Not so successfully, but just chipping away. 

But it's time to get back to chipping away at it.

Midst of change

Final cross country meet
Over the weekend we had the final cross country meet of the season. I found out late Friday night that I was needed to drive a school van (10-seater) to the meet, which meant getting up at 5.30 on Saturday! I've usually been able to sleep a bit later than that, even when we've left with the team at 6.50 because David's taken care of getting breakfast started, but it was all me on Saturday with David still in the US.

Driving the school vans isn't my favourite thing to do either, they are just a bit bigger than I'm comfortable with. Though thankfully the roads between here and the meet are mostly straight and wide and I had one of the coaches with me who reminded me at appropriate times to take a turn wider. Tokyo roads aren't the easiest with larger vehicles. So I avoided any scrapes, but didn't avoid having a long day. Thankfully, though, it was a short meet and we were home by 3pm.

But I'm glad I went. Our middle son got a ribbon for coming 3rd out of the 9th graders who competed and our youngest finally ran a better time than his best last year.

Fun run
Then yesterday we had the annual end-of-season CAJ fun run and as we've done before, David and I helped out with the data input. The CAJ coach who runs cross country (not just for CAJ but for the whole league and even has a part to play in the Asia-Pacific meet in Guam) is not a teacher, he's the computer tech person for the school (I don't know his official title). Cross country is all about times and you can guess how the season is run: lots of technology. Everyone is entered into the database and their places, teams, and times are recorded. Yes, even for the fun run! It's a lot easier for the usual season because the runners all wear chips on their shoes, so it's all set up to be pretty automatic. 

But yesterday we had to manually enter a lot of students into the database (not all, some were already in there) and then manually record all their places (all 120+ of them). We didn't get home till after 6pm (beginning soon after school finished at 3.30). It got cold, one of the coaches who's been around for more than 30 years said it was the coldest fun run he remembers.

It was the changeover of sporting seasons and the first wrestling training of the next season began straight after the fun run. Two of our boys were there. And because they started later than usual they went trained later than usual, our middle schooler wasn't home until 7pm. Dinner ended up a mess because the boy who was supposed to cook wasn't home in time and I hadn't been shopping as I'd intended to do. Our usually fairly well-ordered evening was in a shambles. My head was in a bit of a shambles: two sporting seasons in one day!

Struggling with change
I'm really not fond of this part of autumn because we're plunging into winter at a rapid clip. I hate it that it need to wear so many clothes and that our house is so cold. But, as I keep reminding myself, I've made it through many a winter here, by God's grace I'll make it through another!

I'm also struggling with uncertainty. I don't know if our middle son will do wrestling this year. He's not put his hand up yet. He's concerned about his cold and cough. So I'm taking him to the doctor this afternoon. He's got a family history of asthma and a personal history of respiratory issues, so hopefully we can get this sorted.

I'm struggling with change too. This year our eldest is assisting the coach, not wrestling. Last year it was great to anticipate the season and wonder how he'd do, but this year is different. Not bad, just different.

Anxiety and worry
I've just listened to a sermon about anxiety and God's grace. It was convicting to say the least. Yep, I'm sinning every time I am anxious and every time I tell people I'm worried. It's food for thought and for action, that's for sure. I need to grow in trusting God, who's got me and my circumstances in his hands. Trusting him to help me through periods of change and uncertainty, rather than taking things into my own hands. This is what I need to do, to learn how to do more and more.

The change of these last few days is minor compared to the changes coming up for our family in 2018. It's going to be an ongoing battle to trust. Only by God's grace.

Three things I didn't used to have

Here are three candid photos from my entryway.

A basket of scarves. Yes, they're mostly mine! And no, they aren't ornamental, they are to keep me warm. I rarely wear scarves as an accessory because it is so nice to be free of them after having to use these for so many months.

A couple of baskets with other bits and pieces of winter gear, including earmuffs for riding. And no, this isn't mostly mine.

A cupboard of jackets. Half of these are mine.

I was an innocent Queensland-girl when I came to Japan 16 years ago. Since then I've learned about all sorts of winter gear that I barely knew existed before! I've learned that being able to walk out the door without "kitting up" is such a luxury! In Tokyo I use at least some of this gear for almost half the year (in that cupboard are varying weights of jackets).

Spring is being shy. A little slow in coming this year. I'm hoping we'll be able to put a lot of this away soon.

A bit chilly in Tokyo

Here is another topic that hits missionary's budgets: heating. I wrote a more detailed blog post about this some time ago, that you can find here.

For today I thought I'd show you what I did this morning, in my dressing gown, in our backyard. 

I'd just taken the second photo of the low outside temperature from inside when I discovered our kerosene heater downstairs (our main source of heat during the day) had run out of fuel. So I popped out the "back door" and filled up the metal tank from one of our two portable kerosene tanks using a simple hand-operated siphoning pump.

I'm glad we now do this out the back, previously we used to have to go out the front (practically onto the road) and squeeze down the side of the carport between bikes and the dusty car to where we stored the kerosene. Not something you do in your dressing gown and fluffy PJs at 8.15am on a school day!

We use kerosene rather than air conditioning or gas because it is the cheapest way to heat here. We do have three electric heaters upstairs (bathroom and boy-bedrooms), but they are only used for short periods when people are using those rooms. Kerosene is a common way that Japanese people heat their houses.

But yes, things are a bit chilly around here, a normal Tokyo winter. I've become aware that I could be storing most of the food from my fridge in the stairwell/entry way. The temperature there hasn't gone above 10C for a while. It's not as cold as many parts of Japan north of here (and up in the mountains), but as we've got poor insulation in our house (including a number of large windows) and no central heating, it's cold enough for me.

These days David and I are sleeping with our electric blanket on low and with beanies and two bankets and a thick doona (duvet/comforter/Continental quilt). I've also added a soft neck warmer in recent days to help with the muscle tightness I struggle with. My boys laugh.

A secret Japanese weapon

We've escaped to the west of Tokyo and into the mountains. No, not camping, but our mission's holiday house. Wonderful! So I'm probably not going to be doing much blogging this week. My goal is to sleep and read and relax.

I did want to show you this secret weapon Japanese use to survive cold winters. Kairo: disposable hand warmers. They are air activated and last several hours. Quite nice in roomy boots too, if you have cold feet.

Now I've Googled it I realise it isn't just a Japanese thing, but they are widely available here. We don't use them much, but they were valuable when we were camping last month, I can tell you! I find it amusing that they use a kangaroo on the packaging.

Long winter skirt

After a couple of serious posts, here is something less serious.

I acquired this polar fleece skirt from Thrift Shop in April this year. For some reason no one wanted it and it was still there when we did the "Free shopping" just before clean up time. I'd been laughing at it all Thrift Shop and then just decided that I had to have it.

It's turned out to be an amazingly warm skirt. 

Coming from sunny Queensland where daytime temperatures are rarely lower than 15 degrees Celsius, it has never occurred to me that wearing skirts would be possible in the winter. When we first arrived in Japan, we had a supervisor who never wore anything else in winter, she even shovelled snow in a skirt. She declared that skirts were warmer than pants because there was greater shared-heat! I thought she was nuts, and obviously had been living in Sapporo too long! 

Actually at the time I never wore casual skirts in summer or winter, but that's changed in the last 10 years.

So, in Tokyo, from about November to April, I exclusively wear long pants. For a good portion of that time I also wear a second layer underneath, the amazing invention of long johns!

But now I've discovered that long winter skirts, combined with tights or dark coloured long johns also work. Now you're all wondering if you'd find me wandering the streets in this "ducky" skirt and the answer is "NO!" But it does make warm home-wear. Working at my desk next to a large glass sliding door when the temperature is below 10C is cold, especially on my legs and feet. So sometimes this week, I've slipped out of uncomfortable jeans into this comfy skirt when I've gotten home and it's been lovely. It's like wearing a blanket!

The next step will be whether I can bring myself to buy an "outside" worthy skirt and wear it in public? I stopped by a favourite clothes shop yesterday and browsed in the long winter skirt section (there are short winter skirts too, but that's just for the young and brave). Yes, there are some nice casual winter skirts out there. I might just add one to my wardrobe sometime soon.

More photos from camping

Here are some other miscellaneous photos from our camping trip.

Defrosting a tea towel over the fire so we could wash-up breakfast on our first morning. Do notice the boy in the background. This guy regularly wears shorts to school in winter, it is notable that he has a hat and gloves on!

Second morning: frozen washer (face cloth).

We needed snow chains just to get into the campsite and out again. These things are tricky to get on and very noisy if you get off the snow onto bitumen as we did on Friday going out to get a couple of extra ingredients for lunch.

We were amused to find this toilet-paper origami chart next to the pedestals. I guess it would be useful if you were planning on spending a lot of time sitting there. 32 steps!

A large icicle found by our youngest. Notice his bare arms! He'd been digging in the snow and got quite warm.

The ubiquitous pickup truck that all campsites in Japan own, as do most farmers. They all look the same as this!

Not the best of photos, but this is snow piled up on a fence. Any slightly horizontal surface catches snow and it piles up: even on power lines and washing lines!

I looked in envy on these on-site accommodations as we set up camp on Thursday. They are still "tents" and you have to bring most of your own bedding but have heaters inside and a covered area with a table and BBQ outside. But we paid a lot less for our little piece of snow-covered gravel, and had the satisfaction of doing a reasonably good job of it too. No one has come home sick or any the worse for wear (except for a bit of weariness).

I can't finish without putting up this amazing view. This David and I both saw on walking back from the toilet block to our tent on the first morning and I snapped it on my iPhone that happened to be in my jacket pocket. I put the photo up on Facebook and to my boys' amazement it garnered more than 130 likes, loves, and wows plus many comments. A friend said: that could be anywhere in the world, but I wouldn't have picked Japan!

Our unexpected camping adventure

We're back from our camping trip. It turned into a bigger adventure than we'd planned for and for a little while I wondered if we'd finally bitten off more than we could chew. If you thought we were crazy for going camping at this time of year when temperatures regularly dip below zero, then this story will convince you we really are.

What our journey out of Tokyo looked like.

On Thursday school finished at midday and we planned as usual to leave as soon after that as possible. The unexpected was snow. It snowed all morning!

Digging out our tent site with a borrowed spade. The boys were great,

they just wished that we had more than one spade.

Because we lived in snowy Sapporo for four years (with its average yearly fall of five meters) we aren't usually impressed with Tokyo snow. It's often a small amount and very short-lived. November snow is almost unheard of here. The last time it snowed this early in the season was more than 50 years ago! The snowfall on Thursday was bigger than we expected. We even got stuck behind snowplows on the highway.

We were prepared for cold but not snow. We had to borrow a spade to shovel our tent site. It was covered with several inches of loose snow when we arrived.

There were doubts we would make it but when the boys managed to dig out a rectangle that was the perfect size (without measuring) we cheered. At that moment we realised how experienced we were at camping and from that point doubts drained away.

We arrived only thirty minutes before the sun disappeared, however, so we did much of the extraneous setting up in the dark, including bed-making and fire-starting. Thankfully it was a powered site so we used our one light to advantage as well as the light inside the backdoor of the van. Thankfully, too, I'd spent that morning making dinner (Japanese Curry Rice) so all we had to do was warm it up.

Dessert on our first night: foil packets with bananas, chocolate, and
 marshmallows, or some combination of those. We accidentally left
a left-over banana out of the cooler overnight and it froze!

After dinner we washed up and raced to the ofuro (Japanese bath) then raced back and jumped into our beds still warm.

The next morning we were greeted with an amazing winter wonderland. Indeed it was a gorgeous blue-sky day.

Walking back from the toilet block at 7am.

Lake Sai.

Autumn caught snoozing.

-5.9˚C is a record for us!

But it was exceptionally cold. I wore many layers and my core was okay but my feet suffered. As the day wore on it didn't warm up past about 5C but it was enough for the places that got sun to become mush and we were sloshing around by early afternoon. My outside ugg boots got soaked and kept my feet cold.

We walked down the road to see some local lava caves, formed during Mt Fuji's explosion in the 800s. A bit sobering as we realised we were camping at the foot of the giant mountain (though we couldn't see it due to a small mountain between us and it). The caves were pretty cool, however. Just the thing even big boys could enjoy.

Lava cave.

Though most of us weren't prepared for wet
snow, our youngest was, with all his plastic
snow gear and he had fun building snow creations.

As we began to lose light at 4.30 we started dinner (simple hot dogs) with the goal of getting to the bath then bed (and getting our feet into dry socks) as soon as possible.

I think late afternoon as the temperature dipped again was the worst I felt, almost nauseous at times. However, despite what you may suspect we had happy campers 95% of the time. One of the keys was lots of food and frequently!

Our second morning wasn't as cold but neither was it as pretty. The sky was mostly grey and much of the pretty snow had melted or turned into grey mush.

Everything outside was covered in frost and inside the
tent everything that hadn't been touched by the water
seeping up through the holes in the floor was covered in
condensation.

We took our time packing up and it was a little complex as almost everything was wet, inside and out. We had huge puddles inside the tent but amazingly our bedding was protected by an aerobics mat and thin silver-coated foam that we'd put down for insulation from the ground.

Our trip home was all autumn again. Like the clock had been wound back! 

Autumn leaves on the way home.

People may think we're crazy but we weren't out there alone. There were several other campers, including several who arrived well into the evening on Friday and set up completely in the dark. There were people fishing, even water skiing. As we packed up on Saturday a guy came with his two large parrots and set them up with a playground then put up his tiny tent beside them! If we're crazy, we've got plenty of company in Japan!

These two older guys set up in the dark after we went to bed on Friday night.

We have created some great memories. We'll be talking for a long time about "that time we went camping in the snow"! On our way driving down we introduced the boys to "TheFour Yorkshireman" skit by Monty Python. Our guys now have their very own "you're lucky . . . . remember the time Mum and Dad took us camping in the snow". I personally will treasure conversations had while we washed up (one adult paired with one kid makes for great conversation) and while huddled around the campfire trying to warm our hands and feet.

On Thursday evening when we were nearly set up I realised that everyone was in high spirits. After living with guys for the last 19 years I've gradually realised that guys love to be challenged, especially a physical challenge. Even if you have to boot them into the challenge, they love pitting themselves against the odds and coming out a winner. That is what we've done this time. We pitted ourselves against extreme weather with less than ideal equipment—our tent is not a winter tent and all our sleeping bags are second-hand, not what you'd take to trekking in Nepal. And we survived, not just survived, but came out the better for it as a family, I believe! 

But just so as we're clear, we never planned to camp in the snow and don't plan on doing it again. But we will camp again at this time of year. Anyone know of a warm place we can camp at within two hours of Tokyo at the end of November?