Bicycle-free Camping Trip

Well, this is it - the final countdown to our Golden Week camping trip.

Golden Week is the cluster of national holidays that fall together every year in late April/ early May, and most people take a few personal days and end up with a consecutive ten or eleven days off. Well, Brian and I are preparing to go camping for this year's eleven-day Golden Week holiday.

I know we haven't said anything before today, but the truth is, we were completely caught up in other activities; too caught up to talk about our upcoming camping trip. We have not, however, been too caught up to do all our camping preparations! We have been long getting ready for our first real camping extravaganza in over a year - I washed our camping blankets and cookware a few weeks ago, then last week I went shopping to stock-up on good camp food (like sausages and instant ramen) and other supplies (like chopsticks and charcoal). Brian has been sorting out the music we will be bringing - MP3s that he will transfer from his computer to a disc for playing on the MP3 car audio player (complete with excellent sub-woofer!). We even bought a new map book; many of the maps we have are for specific areas, and we occasionally find ourselves "off the map", so this time we bought one that covers all Japan.

We plan to head out hopefully tonight. If not, then surely before sunrise tomorrow. We have narrowed down the area where we would like to set up camp - taking weather and traffic conditions into consideration, we will head for Tottori or perhaps even Shimane prefecture. Brian will do the driving, and I will do the navigating. My map reading skills (and kanji skills, too) have improved over the last few years, so I am confident that I can get us to our destination without too much of a detour ...this time;-)

One thing that will be different about this camping trip is that we are leaving the bikes at home. Yes, we will, instead, be Japan Campers, not Riders, at least for this spring holiday. Leaving the bikes behind makes sense - it will make packing a lot easier, give us more space in the Pajero, and allow more flexibility in our travels.

In order to make our packing easier and less fallible, we have also put together this camping list, which is located at Japan Rider.com.