moderate. ly hard.

After living here for 2 years you can find yourself in a rut. Staying on base is way to easy and comfortable and to be honest getting bundled up for a day traipsing around Tokyo, finding your way on the train and playing charades at every restaurant you order from just doesn't seem that "fun" and appealing anymore. You end up telling people you live in Japan, but all you do is drive to Chili's on base and drive home, maybe stopping at Baskin Robbins on your way home for a little "culture." So some days/weekends we have to force ourselves off base. Well we had a day off over the holidays and woke up with a wild hair (me more than Tdub) to go on a hike. So we sent out a quick text to a few friends saying we were leaving in 20 if they could get ready in time. Surprisingly, 3 were able to get their act together in time (if you knew these friends it would be even more, surprisingly.) ;)

We loaded up some sushi we had in the fridge, 4 trail mix bars, 2 nalgene's of water, lonely planet book with map and directions for hike and 4 chu-hi's. Now mind you we, thought we might need a little snack or two on the hike.

Lonely Planet listed this hike at easy to moderate. Now I am not sure who they had come to Japan to find, write and do this hike, but it must have been Aron Ralston (before the 127 hours) or someone he hangs out with. There was nothing easy about this hike. :) Its said it was a 4-5 hour hike...maybe. if you sprint the whole thing. and they fail to mention you have to hike about an hour to get to the "start" of the hike. a very smug ex-pat overheard our conversation on the bus and said in a very smug like voice, "oh, you're just now starting your hike?" yes, very smug ex-pat, we are. now once the sun started to go down in the middle of our hike and we were very cold and racing the sun to the bottom of the mountain we realized why "smugger" had made such a comment, but we are adults, and did I mention, she was very smug?

We got to the top of Mt. Otake-san in about 2 1/2 hours for a great view of Mt. Fuji-san and overlook.

Tdub and I realized we were the only ones out of our friends that had brought food (remember that whole "got ready in 20 minutes" thing? yeah, hard to remember everything on the list with that little time. too bad that's the first thing T and I think of...we don't care where we're going or what we'll see when we get there, but what do you think we will eat along the way? ha!) that food that might get eaten, was devoured. all of it.

After taking some pictures and nomming on sushi and the chu-hi's that saved the day we then found out it was 4 more hours to the bottom if we kept going. uhhh...not a hard decision to turn around and go back the way we came. It was a fun adventure, an excuse to get off base and no matter if the task is easy or hardly easy it's always more fun with fun company and a few chu-hi's.

Lonely Planet, call me if you want your hike rewritten, by a normal person.