2026 Golden Week wrap up

For most people in Japan, Golden Week (GW) was from Wednesday, April 29th to Wednesday, May 6th. For us, it was from May 3rd to May 11th, so we just got back to work today.

I originally had plans to go hiking in Fukui Prefecture, but my friend got hit by a car a few weeks ago when he was on his bicycle and sprained his foot pretty badly, so the plan got derailed. Everything in Japan is booked up months ahead of GW, so just about our only option was camping.

Even almost all campgrounds are booked full, so the only option available to us was also the closest, Kokochi Camping Ground

(虎口池キャンプ場) about 25 minutes south of my house. Why was it not booked up, Dave? Well, the 3 main reasons are no electricity, no water, and some people say it is haunted. However, it is also free, unstaffed and sparsely booked, so it was perfect for us.

My friend Chris (also a hiking trip refugee) came over from Hiroshima and we camped out for 2 nights.

Day 1 was rainy, but luckily the rain held off long enough that we could set everything up before it started. The day started out well, with a dead battery in my car, but worse things happened to car last week (pay attention, this is called foreshadowing). My friends John and Eri-sensei stopped by with their dogs to hang out a little bit before the rain. It was too wet for a campfire, so we contented ourselves to playing some board games in our dome screen tent. As we went to bed, the rain seemed to be dying down, which was good because last year our big tarp collapsed in the middle of the night due to water pooling in it. We called it "the tarpocolypse".

This year we got "the domeocolypse". All day, there was rain but absolutely zero wind. Around 1:30 or so, I heard some cars pulling out of the camping area and I noticed it was very windy. I had a gut feeling something was strange, so I got out of the tent with my headlight and saw that our screened in dome tent was gone! Then I found it about 50 feet away slung over my car. The straps along the bottom had caught on my roof rack, or that sucker may have blown out over the Seto Inland Sea. I quickly pulled it back to our site and hammered the stakes down. I knew the metal poles had messed up my car, but I didn't see how badly until the morning. There are not giant scratch marks all over my hood.

Yesterday, I tried to polish them out with a fairly aggressive polishing compound and it make no change at all, so if you have any suggestions, let me know.

The rest of the camping was good weather and sunny. Ayumi came out for a few hours on the second day, but she didn't want to stay overnight due to the pit toilet situation.

I mostly relaxed the rest of the vacation. On Thursday, I went to BJJ practice and replaced the battery in my car. The boys had school on Thursday and Friday. Tatsuki had his first high school kendo tournament on Saturday. His team won their first round match, but went down in the second round. Tatsuki won one and had a draw, so that was a pretty good result for his first two matches at that level. I hosted some friends for a game of Dungeons & Dragons on Saturday. It was my first time to be the full time Dungeon Master, and I think it went pretty smoothly and people had fun. As with 99% of D&D games, it all took longer than anticipated at the outset.

Sunday the boys and I went to Kajukenbo practice. And of course, it was Mother's Day, and the boys made some sweet cards for their mommy. Ayumi was suitably moved.