Day 2/3 - Hanging in Yukiguni

Tokamachi area is part of Yukiguni, literally Snow Country. This has been used historically to refer this part of Japan, and for good reasons. Nobue's home village - Karekimata - is deep in it, even in early April - rice fields and hills still covered in snow with road cut piles still over 2 meters in height. Not much to do but recover from traveling here and visiting physically remote family.

Our stay was made more comfortable by being able to use the hostel-like Karekimata Ecomuseum. Usually we stayed at the Yamada family house, but that often meant discomfort on both sides - mostly due to more people in a smallish area. The Ecomuseum offered a much more comfortable and spacious place to stay where we wouldn't be underfoot all the time.

The Ecomuseum started about 30 years ago as an effort to raise some visibility to the village and bring in some visitors. Nobue has actually been contributing to their quarterly newsletter with items about California. The building itself has grown from a nice meeting hall to a full scale hostel, complete with a commercial kitchen and wifi.

The living space is very local - large tatami rooms meant for futon sleeping. The size and organization makes it flexible for large groups - the large rooms are separated by shoji (the Japanese sliding doors) so that there are 4 rooms that could support about 4 people each. The target audience is city folks who want to sample/remember the countryside with maps for trails and local remote campgrounds.

With few distractions (i.e., closest convenience store being 30 minutes away, for reference) it is a good place to just chill, both literally and figuratively. Taking a walk involves which direction you want to go - right or left; only one road through here lined with months of piled snow. We went left this time...

Happily, we were joined by Marie' who was free to join us for a couple of days - first of more days later in the trip. The day was gray with the snow melting with intermittent rain. The road is bordered on both sides by rice fields deeply covered in snow. When melted, the water is saved in ponds and diverted to the local river for later use when planting the new corp. In winter, it is a white wonderland.

It's quiet and crisp - walks are quick to get back to the heated lodge. But the views help make the chill a bit more bearable. The sound of the water flowing in the trenches is about the only sound above the wind here.

Food Time!

Countryside meals are pretty simple, especially in the winter. Breakfast is usually rice (the really good crop my brother-in-law brings in), eggs from the chicken coop, left-overs from previous meals, and tea.

We were lucky with lunch and dinner that there were some early harvests of the mountain veggies.

Remember these from yesterday's hike? <-- They became this after a light batter and fry. -->

Nobue's sister, Yoshiko, was our cook for the weekend. She is the oldest living sibling but still is mighty in the kitchen, usually with a 0 cal beer within reach 😑.

The day finished off with a meal of Yoshiko's tempura and niku-don (beef bowl) supplemented with a variety of sashimi from the local market. It was for my niece Nanae's birthday which brought a warm close to a cold, snowy day.

As usual, the full gallery of shots taken for this blog are available my photo site here.

Couple of Notes:

• The first day's issue may have had some formatting issues on Gmail and Apple, not sure about Outlook but worked on Thunderbird. This is because (a) Google's filters mess with the formatting code, and (b) Email is not a browser so not everything that works in the browser will work in the emails. Follow the links in the title to see the full "glory" if it looks weird in the email.
• This post was mostly done earlier today but flaky wifi on the Shinkansen resulted in it not being posted until the end of today, which was mostly a travel day. I'll try to be more timely but I gotta see stuff...