Rain Storm

When I started planning Sara's time while she was here I thought that it would be fun to travel a little bit. Being in Japan is an experience and I wanted us to visit some different parts of Japan while she was here and not get stuck in Yokosuka. So after some help from one of the chaplains and some other people, I decided that it would be fun to go to Hakone. It’s more of a small town village in the mountains that has some good places to hike, but its more famous for its many onsens. Onsens are hot springs and apparently Hakone has a lot of them. Anyways so after Eigisan's on Sunday Sara and I planned our little trip. We decided to go to a place called Yunessun, which is this Japanese onsen park thing place. It seemed pretty cool and so we decided to go for it. We made a reservation with one of the youth hostels in Hakone and planned on leaving early Monday morning.

Monday morning we left for Hakone and finally make it to Yunessun. Yunessun is this huge spa place with a bunch of different spas (coffee spa, green tea spa, sake spa, wine spa, dead sea spa) and places to eat. It didn't live up to is reputation and the pictures in the brochure made this place look a lot sweeter than it really was. It wasn't bad, we still spent three hours there, but it definitely wasn't an all day thing. So after Yunessun we went to our youth hostel. It was raining and getting dark so we didn't want to do much adventuring at the time.

We arrived at the youth hostel and got settled in to our room. We soon decided that we were hungry and wanted some food. The host wasn't making dinner that night and so he told us to take a bus down to the main village and eat at this ramen restaurant. So we left and waited in the rain at the bus stop for about 10 minutes. We finally made it to the ramen restaurant that was the only store open at 7 o'clock in the whole village. We met some guy named Stan from NY. We enjoyed some good, warm ramen, had a nice conversation and then got ready to leave for the youth hostel. Then the excitement came. I didn't really prepare for rain, well I'm not really prepared for rain at all. We had bought an umbrella from a convenience store earlier and we probably should have bought two. Anyways, upon leaving the ramen restaurant we found ourselves in the middle of a rainstorm...like the worst one I have ever been in. I haven't been in rain that much so it probably wasn't horrible, but it was still raining pretty hard. We ran to the bus stop, which luckily had some cover and waited for our bus. After the bus came and picked us up we rode it to our stop and when I saw the door open and how hard it was raining I thought to myself, "Oh this should be fun. Our dad will be proud of us." Our youth hostel was about 1/4 of a mile away, which was far enough away for us to get soaked, super soaked. I had jeans on, a shirt, long sleeve shirt, and sweater, which the rain got through all of them. The umbrella was of no use because it was so windy that it would've have just broken. So we sprinted. It was especially fun when the wind would blow at us and so we would get hit by more raindrops than usual.

We finally reached the youth hostel. Luckily, there was a dryer that we could use, but still, I hadn't prepared for rain. I planned on just wearing my jeans both days and that was about it. The youth hostel had one main bath area for guys and one for girls and so we didn't have a bathroom in the room. (Japanese bathrooms are an experience too.) Sara brought some pajama pants and so we had to figure out how to dry our clothes, take showers and get warmed up, and get back to our room without looking indecent. We managed and had a very nice restful night. We made a good memory even though it wasn't the best situation at the time. The next day was beautiful and Mt. Fuji was in clear view. I'll share some about that in my next blog.