We had breakfast at the buffet – which was super strange since I’ve thought that buffets are like the worst things you can do during Covid. The buffet is a good one, and since we are here on a weekday (Monday through Thursday) there aren’t too many people anyway.

In the morning, Lisa and Momo went for a forest walk, and Alan and I joined the “Forest Sky Walk” – a kind of adventure thing where you climb around in the trees and do Zip lines on a harness system. Alan is a lot like me when I was a kid, and nervous about physical challenges, so when we signed up for the adventure course, I was a bit worried he would change his mind. We signed up for level 3 out of 4 levels – he was too short for the final level. When we got to the course, he wanted to cancel, but he was a good sport and we climbed up to the first activity in Level 3 – a suspension bridge between trees. You are on a pulley and harness system the whole way, so you aren’t in any real danger, but as soon as we got up there and he hit the first segment, he wanted to cancel. We talked him through it a bit though, and he was able to make it to the next tree! There were four activities in the 3rd level: a swing bridge, then bridge with foot hoops, then a tarzan swing into a net, and finally a zip-line. They were all pretty tough, and as I expected the Tarzan swing was the hardest – he did the swing ok, but then when he got onto the net wasn’t able to climb to the platform. So we pulled him back twice and one of the staff helped him onto the platform from the other side. He also did the zip-line! When we finished with the level 3 course, he was done, but the staff asked if he would try level 1, which is “very easy” compared to level 3. With a bit of convincing from the staff he did that too, which was a lot easier. It had I think some kind of slat bridge, then a log bridge, then a net climb, another kind of net bridge, and a zipline. The zip lines were really fun. After all of that my hands were pretty sore, and he said he would never do it again, but he did have some fun and made some good memories. I’m proud of him – he did a great job, and pushed on even when he didn’t want to do it.

For lunch we stopped at the coffee shop and split their two person sandwich plate – Alan and I split a sandwich and Momo and Lisa split one. They have a nice little outdoor area with fake grass, and interestingly three “working pods” that are re-purposed cable cars. You can rent them (for free) by inquiring at the hotel front desk and getting the key. I thought about doing that, but while I’m here I’m only doing some minimal email checks, and not doing any work if I can avoid it. I wouldn’t check email either, but past experience has shown that spending an hour a day on email while on time off saves a whole bunch of time when I return to work later.

In the afternoon we went to Oomurasaki Center Park, a large park that also has a butterfly/insect museum. We had a nice time walking around (or, in Momo’s case, being carried by daddy) and seeing the exhibits. Alan and Momo weren’t too interested in the “touch the beetles!” section of the museum, but Lisa really enjoyed it. We probably would have walked around the very large park more, except Alan (like his father before him) isn’t really a big fan of the outdoors. Also, someone was tired of carrying Momo around all day, so we just took a short little walk before heading back to the hotel.

We came back and relaxed a bit at our hotel room for a while. The hotel has two large baths, one for women and one for men, as well as a shared outdoor bath that you need a swimsuit to enter. These are separate from the pool facilities – which we plan to visit tomorrow. Alan and I went to the men’s bath, and Lisa and Momo went to the women’s bath. Notably, these are not Onsen – the strictly classified natural hot springs. Those have to be certified as having water from volcanic heated underground sources and some composition of minerals (I’m not too clear on it.) These are just baths. It was really nice – Alan and I relaxed for a while in the bath, and did check out the outdoor bath as well, but it wasn’t as big as I expected.

After everyone met up back at the hotel room, we had dinner in the room from one of the nearby restaurants. We also finished off the beer that we bought the previous day from local brewery. It was a full day, so we all turned in a bit early.

This is our last night here, and we have dinner planned at a fancy restaurant associated with the hotel. We hope that Momo will enjoy it, but that isn’t until the evening. We went out for breakfast at the buffet, and relaxed a bit more at the hotel – Alan had a Zoom meeting with his friend he made at International school who moved to Vietnam a few days ago.

After we returned from breakfast we took a short break, and then headed to the pool at about 10am. The pool complex is very nice – a large indoor wave pool, and there is an area for kids that has small water slides, a bunch of fountains and water spouts, a pool with a lot of balls for kids to throw at a stepped waterfall, a hot tub / jaccuzzi that continues outside, a bunch of rental equipment, a restaurant, lots of bridges going around the place, and maybe some other stuff. Alan hasn’t yet learned to swim well – I need to work on that – so he took a life vest. We spent over three hours at the pool area – the kids really liked the wave pool when that ran for ten minutes at the top of the hour every hour. I was in the pool long enough that I really started to dehydrate, so I sat down for a bit and drank a lot of water.

After our long pool session we walked back to our room and ordered a hamburger lunch to take back to the room. Since we have a nice dinner planned, Lisa and I split a burger, and the kids had a bunch of fries and a cheeseburger. Momo went down for a nap super quick, and we all took a bit of a break. At about 4pm, we headed out for a 10 minute walk to a nearby ranch where they have horses you can (pay to) ride. Once we got there though, it started to rain, so we turned around and came back. We didn’t have time to ride anyway, since dinner is at 5:30. Momo and Alan did enjoy watching the horses walk around, and we got some exercise, so that was nice.

We had a very nice multiple course meal Itaian at the hotel restaurant, Otto Sette. Lisa and I had a set of three glasses of wine (sparkling, white, and red). There was a choice of 3 different wines for the white selection, and I of course chose the one called “Funky Chateau”. I don’t remember what the other two were. All of the wine was local to the area. The meal was great, but very long – I’m really proud of both kids. Alan looked the best dressed in his suit that we got him for his kindergarten graduation (it still fits but this is likely the last time he can use it). For a three hour meal, he was great, he had a five course kids meal and enjoyed it. He spent most of the time reading books on his kindle, which is fine. Momo did great, and ate a lot of pasta, but halfway through we gave her my iphone and she watched a few episodes of “Hey, Gaba Gaba!”. A very nice family meal, and we got a few pictures to commemorate it. During the early part of the meal one of the kids from the table over banged into the partitions between tables, and Lisa, who at the time just happened to look over to check on Alan, saw it an caught it before it came crashing down onto her head. The staff was very apologetic, but since we have kids too, it just really isn’t a big deal. There were lots of families with kids there – we started dinner at 5:30pm for just that reason – and it seems like lots of other families had the same idea. The dessert course was nice, and at the end we had a small plate of cake type bites celebrating a late anniversary. I think Momo ate 70% of them, but we all had a great time.