July 16, 2022

 Sunday - Hot and Sunny, with some clouds

I went to bed a bit late this morning and when I woke up this morning, F was gone. He’d gone to have his massage.

I slept on for a bit, but did wake up around 9:30. I got up, did a partial change of clothing and then went back for more snoozing time. F came back and suggested going to the mountains. I didn’t want to do that, and to be honest, he probably wouldn’t be able to do much when we got there. He can’t walk far and really shouldn’t either.

We ended up deciding to go to Akita instead. I had wanted to go to the Nikaho rest area as it is really nice and they have some great restaurants. I could hear a hamburger calling my name. I suggested to F that we go there. He did suggest going for breakfast first, but I said that if I got an onigiri or two I’d be fine.  I insisted that he get K a bento or something. Even though he’d made her breakfast, we didn’t know when we’d be back. It wasn’t fair to ask her to not eat all day. 

F and I went off to get K a bento and us something to eat. We got her something nice to eat, and us something to eat too. And we picked up a drink as well. We drove back to the house and dropped off the bento. F and I started to eat our onigiri in the driveway. F said he felt a bit weird doing that, but…so what!!

We drove up to Nikaho in Akita Prefecture. When we got to the rest area it was busy. So busy. We had difficulty finding parking and then when we went into the food area…there were no tables available. We decided to try and eat in one of the restaurants and the only one that had space was the Korean place. We went in and both had some Korean food. I had a Bibinba and F had some kind of soup with beef. He liked his, I liked mine. I did tell F over lunch that the whole reason I wanted to come to Nikaho was to go to the hamburger place. Unfortunately, there weren’t seats available outside it, and you couldn’t eat in the restaurant. 

We decided to walk around a little bit. We walked through a festival to the other building. We did a little shopping there and even went up to the observation tower. That was rather nice. Nikaho is just on the other side of Mt. Chokai and about 2500 years ago there was an eruption. Chokai erupted and threw some boulders near Nikaho. They call them islands…originally there was water all around them but now the water has receded. You can see a little of the leftovers from the observation tower. 

A Chinese Princess who was brought to Japan to marry. I think. 

Information about the "islands".

We decided to go back to the car and drove back to Tsuruoka. We did stop and have a Baba Hela along the way. That was a nice treat. 

Baba Hela...sort of an ice, not ice cream.

F wanted to go to the hardware store to get a replacement switch for the kitchen light. It stopped working last night. We arrived at the hardware store and I let F go in and get his switch. I was really tired today and I slept a lot of the way to Akita, and back too. Sigh.

We came back to the house and F did the light switch. I went upstairs and relaxed for a bit. When F came up later he suggested going out for yakitori for dinner. I was a bit surprised by that but thought it was fine. 

He got his mother another bento and then a little later he called a taxi. When it arrived, off we went. 

We went to F’s favourite izakaya and had a pretty good meal.  We had some yakitori, some sashimi, a salad and some drinks. It was a fun time.  We went there by taxi and came back to the house by taxi too.

We had a quiet evening in. I watched a couple of shows off the Fire Stick. I watched another episode of The Boys and then Physical from Apple TV+. 

And that’s about it for my day. It was pretty good after all. I was sad that I didn’t get my burger, but hopefully, I’ll get another chance one day!

I’m not sure what we’ll get up to tomorrow. F has an idea, but I won’t say until we know if we can do it or not.  Come back later if you like and hear all about my day. Until tomorrow….