Golden Week

Golden week has come and gone, but my memory remains. Here in Japan there is a 7 day period during which three public holidays fall. This is called Golden Week because of the mass amounts of time off in such a short period, its “Golden”! Most people go to Korea or China or somewhere far. I was broke, almost, so I didn’t travel very far. However, I did “get away”.
I decided that I would pack up the hiking pack, throw a futon in the back of my car, spend what money I had on gas, and hit the road. My aim was Mt. Iide. Unfortunately it took me about 5 minutes on the road to realize I would never make it, even though Iide is about 3 hours away by car. As you can see in the picture, it is covered in snow and currently not climbable and barely approachable.
Plans changed to B and I decided to aim for Oguni, which is near Iide and has a 5 story wooden pagoda in the middle of a big park with lots of hiking trails. Two hours later I was in Yamagata prefecture and knew I had been thwarted. I calculated that I did not have enough gas to make it to Oguni and back and I did not have anymore money. Therefore I went to plan C.
Plan C was to just hike around my area, Aizu. I did this taking care to visit places that I had never been to before and purposely get lost. I was on roads that I never had been on before. I often had to check the map and when I was hiking during the day I was on trails I had never been on before.
I spent just a few days hiking around and a couple of nights sleeping in the back of the car, but it really put my mind at ease. It was the perfect vacation. I was alone, trekking around, sleeping in my car, eating off a camp fire, reading a lot, and meeting the occasional interesting Japanese person.
I had a few conversations with Japanese hikers who also appeared to be on their own, but the kicker was on the second day when I saw hang-gliders at the top of “Flower Mountain” I couldn’t fathom why they were circling the mountain so I hiked up to find them. I saw the last two hang-gliders take off for the day and then talked to the instructor who had the job of packing up. He told me its quite fun, and not really scary at all. I only believe him a little.