Namakuramura

The last few day it has been Golden Week here, actually calling it a week is a total lie, it should be Golden few Day Off! Anyway, we headed off to the mountains in Gunma for a few days, the campsite was at the top of a mountain and the middle of nowhere, it was a 40 minute drive to the supermarket! It was extremely beautiful, the mountains are all covered by forest, it is a shame more visitors to Japan don't get to see more of the country side and considering something like 80% of Japan is covered by forest you would think it would be more famous for it's forests than the flashing lights of Shinjuku!

This is the view from the top of the campsite, the bath house was here too so the view form the bath was like this, pretty impressive.

We of course did all the usual camp stuff, BBQ food and toasted marshmallows - yum. There was much eating and sleeping done, isn't that what holidays are for?
And the campsite had this massive roller slide that Ebi-kun LOVED and he realised that he went down quicker if either me or daddy was on with him - the child is a speed freak! Some of the other kids were sitting on beer boxes to make themselves go faster.
We did have a visitor in the night, both me and Hubby heard something walking around the tent, the next morning we discovered the evidence....

then a bit later when we were driving down the mountain we spotted our visitor in the woods...
There was also a lot of collecting going on, I had got Ebi-kun a bug box to collect his specimens in, luckily he isn't into bugs much but he did collect a LOT of leaves and the such like, I had packed a drawing pad and crayons so there was quite a bit of drawing going on too. I will have to take pictures of his book, he did a cute picture of daddy at the BBQ and he even drew his airbed and pump.

The second day we went to look at some waterfalls, it was supposedly a 30 minute walk/hike and it was very pretty, I won't bore you with the squillion of photos I took!
We didn't make it to the big waterfall, although we saw lots of small ones, the walk meant crossing a lot of these dodgy (as is rotting) wood bridges (I use that term loosely), and they were getting worse the further we got. Daddy-ebi yomped ahead and came back to say that there was a rickety old ladder we needed to climb to get up to the waterfall, getting up would have been OK but he didn't fancy trying to get down again. So we bottled out. Ebi-kun filled his box with different leaves and a big hunk of moss and spend a good amount of time throwing stones into the water. 
The weather was kind except for the last night, then it rained, luckily it had cleared up in the morning when we broke camp. Ebi-kun loved camping and can't wait to go again and I am with him on that. I have some more photos to share and we also visited a great museum on the way back, more of that tomorrow....