April 15 – May 15, 2020
Places we Traveled:
Nikko, Shiobara, Mashiko, Nokogiriyama/Matsudo, Ashikaga
Peaks:
- Lots of hiking, biking, picnics, and other outdoor activity. On April 16th, the Japanese government announced a state of emergency for the entire country due to the new coronavirus. As a result, travel outside of the prefecture where you live was “strongly discouraged”. We are lucky to live in a prefecture with lots of mountains and rivers to explore. We drove to some scenic waterfalls outside Nikko (where we saw Japanese monkeys), completed a short hike west of Utsunomiya in Kanuma (next to a strawberry farm), biked along the Kinugawa (smoothest pavement my poor bike has seen in months), picnicked by the Hoki river in Shiobara, excavated a frog from my boot hiking in Mashiko, and saw the largest cliff-carved Buddha in Japan hiking Nokogiriyama.
- Continued to get creative in the kitchen, this month we ate a lot of naan bread. I have a very hate-hate relationship with our Japanese combination microwave-oven-grill. So, in terms of an oven…well, we basically don’t have an oven. But I’ve got a pretty solid stovetop flatbread down, successful tortillas, and if you’re worried about our carb intake our rice cooker is incredible. Outside of carbs we also experimented with yakiniku at home this month.
- Caught the tail end of the wisteria bloom at Ashikaga Flower Park. The flower park shut down through the end of the Golden Week holiday as part of the effort to prevent the spread of the virus. As a result, most of the wisteria bloom the park is famous for came and went before people were allowed back in the park. After Golden Week, I visited in time to see the tail end of the bloom, hopefully we can return next year to see the full view.
- Andrew is working from home! I’m not sure this is a peak for him, but I like spending more daylight hours with him even if he is holed up in his closet office blasting the Beach Boys on repeat trying to concentrate.
- More care packages! We are fully stocked on Girl Scout Cookies for the next…15 years or so?
Valleys:
- Well, it isn’t really news that the closures and changes related to coronavirus are mostly a huge bummer. Not much to expand on there.
- Most craft beer in Japan. So, in addition to wine in Japan, craft beer is kind of a letdown. If you like beer flavored beer (and honestly, who doesn’t?) Japan is great. If you’re searching for an IPA, hefeweizen, gose, etc… Don’t come here. We seem to have gotten really lucky finding Outsider Brewing in Kofu, all of the other craft beer we have sampled since then has been just kind of…fine.
