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| Cape Maihama |
We arrived in Japan approximately one year ago (plus a few weeks by the time I published!). I still remember vividly getting ready to board our enormous jet in Seattle. I handed my passport to the ticket agent and looked at Tim with a huge smile and said "Here we go!" only to have her say "Oh, wait just a moment" in response to a message on her walkie talkie. After about ten minutes a pilot staggered off the jetway looking chalk white with a slight tinge of green. He was holding a handkerchief to his face. After twenty minutes or so, we sat down in the ticket line a few feet away from the jetway. After a few hours, we were taking turns walking the kids around and had made fast friends with the next family in line, the Scotts, who also had three small children. After a few more hours, our flight was...canceled.
We collected our 14 bags, three car seats, one stroller, and three extremely tired children and trekked down to baggage claim. Where we waited again for HOURS as the airline scrambled to find housing for us. Children cried. Parents took turns bottoming out with irritation and then laughing with hysteria. We'd gotten three hours of sleep the night before after arriving in Seattle from North Carolina via Chicago at midnight. We'd reported to check in at 5 AM. I asked a pregnant woman who was patiently walking her Pomeranian and her toddler "Is it always like this?" She smiled wryly and said "Always." Finally we boarded a series of shuttle buses and were taken several hours away to the Canandian border to stay at a Native American casino.
When we arrived at the casino, I immediately drew a deep bath to wash off 48 hours or so of airport grime. The jacuzzi tub flooded the room.
We again collected all our bags and moved rooms. We took a shower this time.
The next day we departed at 2 AM to make our 5 AM check in. This time, we left. Just in case, I did NOT say "Here we go!" as we handed over our boarding passes. We slept for almost the entire nine hours. We landed at Yokota Air Force base two days before a typhoon hit and a stunning level of heat and humidity enveloped us immediately, falling over our heads like a load of hot towels the instant we stepped off the plane. I will never forget arriving at TLF (Temporary Living Facility) and all of us collapsing onto the beds at 3 PM like clubbed baby seals.
It was messy and chaotic and completely unforgettable.
A year later, and this was...not that. We spent our Japanniversary on the Izu Penisula.
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| On the approach! The road is right beside the ocean for a lot of the drive. |
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| Like RIGHT BESIDE it. |
It is breathtaking. Ridge after ridge of mountains are pressed together like praying hands, with the villages sheltered below in narrow teardrop valleys. As our faithful van crested yet another steep climb in preparation for yet another precipitious plunge, and we looked out over a panorama of mist veiled mountain forest, I said "This is the kind of place where it wouldn't be shocking to find yourself on level with a brachiosauraus head." Tim said (of course) "I think I would actually find that pretty shocking."
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| The Lost World |
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| Just your basic driveway and parking setup. |
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| A little village squeezed into a valley. |
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| Rice fields. |
We stayed a ryokan with a private open-air onsen in our room. A ryokan is a traditional Japanese style inn, with tatami mats on the floor and futons that the staff spread for you to sleep on and put away in massive cabinets during the day. An onsen is a Japanese style bath. "Open air" in our case meant that you were in a little glassed in porch with windows you could open up. We didn't, because small children. But we COULD have, and that felt luxurious. We also had a wonderful traditional Japanese breakfast each day, which was an experience in and of itself!
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| Breakfast, with the whole grilled fish and large wooden cask of rice not pictured.From top to bottom, left to right: soy sauce, some sort of fruit jelly, pickled something, coddled egg, bean sprouts, sashimi (raw fish) and hot dashi (broth) to quickly cook the fish, more pickles and more pickles. Super helpful caption, right? |
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| Futons spread out for a nap. |
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| A soaking tub big enough for the whole family. It's hard to get an idea of the scale without the kids in it, but I didn't want to post the pictures with them in it for obvious reasons. We could all fit and the tub is deep enough that Emilia could only barely see out of it. The kids were thrilled to take a "Totoro" bath. |
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| The "open air" part. | | |
The way it works is pretty simple. You have a shower head and a little stool, and you clean yourself very thoroughly before you get into the tub: wash hair, scrub your entire body, shave if you plan to, and then you hop into the water perfectly clean. Washing this way makes a lot of sense. You can really make you sure you've lathered everything and then you're not soaking in your own dirt. There are onsens all over Japan, and most are communal affairs. And yes, you are naked in them, though they are segregated by sex. Ours was private, as I said, but there was a much bigger communal onsen at the ryokan, that we did not visit. Sometimes they also include things like "electrical shock baths" or "ramen tubs" or other oddities, but most are very relaxing experiences.
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| You are provided with yukata, light robes, for your wanderings about the onsen. |
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| Tea making supplies are usually provided as well. We promptly hide these from our children. | | |
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| The view from our window. Sunset, not rise. |
The ryokan and onsen itself were nice, but we also took a day trip to a nearby beach with some pretty fantastic rock formations and swim-through sea caves.
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| The beach, in its protected cove. The large rafts out in the bay are swimming platforms for diving and jumping. |
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| A better view, from our actual real camera. |
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| Tim and Addie swam through this cave and said it was filled with lots of little blue fish! |
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| "Look at me! Look at me! Look..ok, fine, whatever." |
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| If you get hungry, have some "Runch". |
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It was just a quick weekend trip, but it was marvelous. Just a year earlier a trip like this would have been totally overwhelming. Driving through Japan, navigating the narrow roads and tolls, staying in a traditional inn, speaking our best (still not very good!) Japanese with people who really didn't speak any English, and still managing to enjoy it all...well, it would have been unthinkable. And yet here we are, not experts by any means, but still doing it, forging ahead. I am proud of us, and so grateful for all the experiences our year has brought us, not least the opportunity to see so much of this beautiful country.
