Silver Week Vacation - Goza Beach

Last week, there were three national holidays in a row, making it a 5 day weekend. Hate Japan when I have to take a vacation day at Christmas, but love Japan when I get 5 day weekends for "Respect for the Aged Day," "Autumnal Equinox Day," and according to my calendar, an unnamed "National Holiday." Amazing. So, 9 of us in the Fuji family + a few cousins made our way down to Mie-ken, a big south/west of where we live. It was a fabulous weekend/week of relaxing on the beach. We rented two bungalows and rented "futons" which really turned out to be more like blankets on a hardwood floor inside the bungalows, but a snooze here and there on the beach made it okay.


It was nice to take in a few sunsets at the beach. Sunsets by where I live aren't much to write home about. Above Liz and I are taking it all in. We grilled almost all of our meals. The guys were gracious enough to cook almost everything. We did grilled pork and beef with Japanese style grill sauce, hamburgers with all the fixings, jerk chicken, and even eggs and sausages in the morning!! Note the inflatable bananas hanging in the trees behind the grill and shower building. I really wanted to take them into the water!!


Since the guys were doing the grilling, the girls became the designated vegetable choppers. Liz got a little bored and became threatening...mostly cuz the pumpkin was so hard to cut!


We grilled pumpkin, onion, peppers, cabbage, mushrooms, and eggplant almost every night! A few meals we ate at a small Japanese restaurant by the beach.

We did a lot of just hanging out, swimming, reading on the beach, playing beach volleyball, doing fireworks -- nothing all that eventful, but just the way we wanted it. Here's a semi-candid of most of the group down by the water on the first day:


The owners were super friendly. They brought us to the grocery store almost every day (the beach is pretty far away from anything civilized...not in walking distance anyway). He brought a few of us out on his boat and they gave us fresh oyster and shell fish for our grill outs. When we were out on the boat, he stopped at one point, got out and came to talk to us. He pointed one way and said, "This way: America." It was quite Christopher Columbus-like.

It was a great weekend, though the trip there and back was tiring since we had to take a ferry, limited express train, the shinkansen bullet train, taxi and local train. It was a great week with the Fuji Family, can't wait til the next great adventure!