The end of Summer is so close. We have a few days forcasted to be popping back into 30°c this week, but overall we’ve dropped down to the point where we can go outside without regret. We escaped out to Karuizawa to visit some friends. Karuizawa is a bit of a resort town. About an hour north of Tokyo. It’s an absolutely beautiful area filled with trees and views. And is cooler than Tokyo. It was the first time we’ve been in cool enough weather for a hike and that’s exactly what we did.
We went to Shirato Waterfall which has a hiking path right next to it. The waterfall themselves is interesting to see. The water comes out of the mountain rather than flowing down from some river. The water cools down the area immensely. The cooling effect was so strong that you could feel it when you turned onto the road that the river runs along. This time we only walked a portion of the hiking route. It would’ve been a good extra hour or two if we were to go the whole route. After a while on the hiking path you’re far enough away from the falls, it gets noticably quiet. At least when we were doing our walk, there wasn’t much sound beyond the bear bells on our bags. Very occasionally a bird made a sound in the distance. Leaves made more noise under our feet than in the wind.
We also checked out Onioshidashi Park. Park where there’s a bunch of volcanic rock from a previous eruption that happened in the 1700s. The park had a handful of rocks that looked like a monkey or a whale or a bird which was amusing, but I quite enjoyed the view we could see from the park.
The wife and I have been looking into gardening more. We’ve repotted a few of our plants. We started experimenting with trying to get some basil growing. Looking into things like lacto-fermentation. We’re exploring things like the lactofermtation to see if we can prepare veggies ahead of time without needing to run to the store quite so much. We can take advantage of not needing to use the fridge as much for storage. At the very least it’s something new to learn and practice and give us some flexibility and variety to our veggie options. We’ll see what we figure out. Seems that autumn is a good season for fermentation, so made good timing to start learning about this.
Second time we’ve moved our lil guy into a larger pot. We have a few trimmings we’ve potted into other pots. We’ll see if we stick with those or we switch them over for some herbs.
Also, been playing UFO 50. If you like NES/SNES-era games packed with secrets. Go play this. It’s a lot of fun.