The Shortest Long Weekend Ever....

Last Thursday was a national holiday so hubby booked Friday off so that we would have a nice long 4 day holiday, Wednesday I packed up the car so Thursday we could set off bright and early. Except it wasn't very bright, it was raining! Ahh but a bit of rain has never hurt anyone so off we went... by the time we had left the highway and got to the mountains in Gunma, the rain was coming down in sheets, we were crawling along and cringing with every clap of thunder and I was beginning to think that maybe camping wasn't such a hot idea! There were also road works along this narrow mountain road, I had to grin at the 'men at work' sign.

We got to our destination around lunch time, the rain was still coming down hard. Next to the campsite is a dinosaur museum and restaurant, so we decided to have lunch and come up with a plan B. For those who don't speak Japanese, I need to explain this bit - in Japanese there is a dish called 'don' which basically means a big bowl of rice topped with something, oyakudon is chicken and egg on rice, gyudon is beef on rice. So, at this restaurant they had Iguanodon and Pteranodon, I tried the Pteranodon, for ¥800 you get the dinosaur (chicken) on rice bowl, pickles, potato salad and udon. Ebi-kun and I shared the dish, it was really good!

Since the rain showed no sign of easing and there was news of a typhoon heading towards us we decided to see if there was a cabin free, the cabins are expensive, ¥9000 plus ¥1000 for each person, the same as three nights stay in a tent. We ended up staying in a cabin for one night and coming home the next day but we did manage to pack quite a bit in. After lunch we headed up the road to the fossil dig, we had booked in to do it Saturday but we figured not everyone is as insane as us and they would have had some cancellations, there were a couple of other nutters out there but there was space for us to join. I love this picture of my little dino digging for fossils :o)

We stayed for an hour and found a few fossils, it was hard to tell which stones we should be looking at because everything looked black due to the rain, not sure if you can tell in the picture but this one is a shell.

After the dig we were drenched to the skin so we went back to the cabin and got changed then went out to the onsen (hot spring). I have a love-hate thing going on with onsen, I don't like going when there are other people there, getting butt naked with a load of strangers (who want to check out your foreigners bits) is not my idea of a good time, luckily it was empty, I had the whole place to myself. The outside pool was lovely, I popped the towel on my head and watched the raindrops dance on the water - ahhhh. Once we were all scrubbed and clean we hunted down a shop to buy some bits for dinner and breakfast and headed back to the cabin.

Ebi-kun was still full of beans so he spent a good chunk of times jumping off the futons

and playing with his new light saber (thank you ¥100 shop!). By 8pm he was tucked up in bed, we turned the lights out so he would go to sleep, 10 minutes later I hear really heavy breathing, when I put the light on both Ebi-kun and Daddy-kun are sparked out! Just as well since we had a busy day ahead of us...