Tomb Raider Part 2: Return of the King

Last month, during the height of cherry blossom season, I went with some friends to a new (for us) park over in Ashikaga (in fact, it is called Ashikaga Park).  There wasn't much to this park but it happens to be built on and around some more ancient burial mounds.  It was a much nicer experience than my previous trip to see some local random boring hills ancient burial mounds.

There are twelve mounds in the immediate area, two of which have blocked-off passageways.  Not too much to say about them that I didn't say in the previous post about the ones in Ota.  My Japanese friend who was with me informed me that old Japanese "kings" were buried here.

There was also at some point a geocache buried near a shrine in the park.  I went back later to try to find it but no luck.  It hasn't been found in a long time so I think it's defunct.

Anyway, it only took three years and going to a different town, but I finally got my interesting (or at least pretty) burial mounds!

hey, where'd that American kid come from?

I hope this poor thing hasn't been growing since 1945

it's rare to get a pic of the sakura that doesn't also include five hundred people

from the top of a mound---can you see the cardboard laying at the bottom?  kids bring it and "sled" down the hill.
and I was afraid of climbing the other burial mounds because it might be rude.  Ha!

view from the top over Ashikaga

A Well-Defended Park

Another geocaching story!  (Again, if you don't know what I'm talking about go here before you continue.) Don't worry, this one involves no blood-shed and disaster.  Several weeks ago I decided to look for a cache in which to drop a travelbug that I had been carrying around for some time.  I looked at the list of caches near our house to see if I could find an easy one that was big enough to hold stuff.

One immediately piqued my interest....it was called "Ruins of a Small Fortress".  Who doesn't want to go see a fortress on a lazy weekday afternoon?  And it was only about three miles from my house!

So I loaded up Cora and off we went.  After some going around in circles on one-way streets I finally got us into.....a very small neighborhood park surrounded by a moat.  It was a bit of a let-down.

This "fortress" is so small that I can't find any information about it at all on the Internet, except for these random photos that are better than mine.  You'll notice at this website that the fortress is labeled "Koizumi Castle".  That's stretching it a bit if you ask me.

iPhone photo of the moat, sorry

no idea, but it down't look old enough to be actual ruins

stone markers and the entrance to an underground cave

ducks in the moat

and the requisite carp

If you're wondering about the geocache, well, I never found it.  After we got there I checked to see if it had been found recently and it had not, so one presumes it is lost.  Let-down all around, but after our most recent geocaching experience, I call it a success that no one was harmed in the hunt. ;)

Also, I will be taking some time off from blogging throughout December but check back after the New Year for more adventures!  Happy Holidays!

Geocache 'Til You Drop

This past weekend we all went to Tokyo to get flu shots.  We spent a night in a hotel so we would have time to eat some good food and do some sight-seeing.  While we were there we did some geocaching.  If you don't know what geocaching is, stop right now and go read this.

Alright, so we headed for a cache located in the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden.  This garden used to be the home of a feudal lord in the 1600's- 1800's.  It eventually became Imperial Gardens for the royal family of Japan and then after that became a national garden open to the public for a small fee.  It's about 140 acres, very wooded and well-landscaped.

taken on my iPhone, hence the quality

we will refer back to this picture later

So we went to the cache location and it turned out to be one of the best kind of geocaches in that it was located exactly where you thought it would be.  It was in the edge of the woods near some old concrete rubble.  It was big enough to hold items and we dropped off a trackable travelbug that we had picked up in a cache near the Tokyo SkyTree.  We picked up a new travelbug to take to the US over the holidays.

And now....for the rest of the story.  You didn't think this was just a nice, boring tale about a garden and a geocache, did you?

As I walked out of the woods after replacing the cache, I banged my knee hard on a piece of the concrete sticking up out of the ground. I hit it riiiight on the bone but it was a small gash with minimal bleeding.  I came out onto the path and told Chad what I'd done.  And then I tried really, really hard to walk it off.  I'm a big fan of  "walking it off"......in theory.  I thought I was fine and over it.

And then.... I had this really good dream that I can't remember.  I was very confused when  I woke up on the ground with Chad holding me and yelling at me frantically.  I was cold and wait....oh, yeah...I'm in this park. Fortunately Chad had caught me before I hit the pavement in a dead faint.

Now those of you who know me very well said "Uh-oh." two paragraphs ago.  For the rest of you, well....I pass out easily.  Blood, needles, childbirth, intense sharp pain of the funny-bone type or any combination thereof and I will keel over in a second.  It's very annoying and seems to be getting worse as I get older.  At this point I've had enough "episodes" that I know I'm supposed to lie down.  But the park was chilly and there was no place to lie down (refer to the photo above) so I was just going to walk it off.

As Chad was trying to get me to wake up a nice man came by and tried to help.  There was a language barrier but he was trying.  I told him I was fine (in Japanese, no less!) and sent him on his way.  Because clearly I was fine, right?  I was just walking it off.

Chad left me kneeling on the ground and went to see to poor Cora who by this time was crying in her stroller.  I was drinking some water and then....I had another great dream that I can't remember. This time when Chad woke me up I was much less confused and Chad was much more frantic.  Let's stop here and appreciate his dilemma.  He didn't want to leave me lying on the ground and go for help yet he couldn't move me and handle the stroller.  And I'd sent away the only person who had offered to help.

At that point I managed to get it together and get up and walk out of the park.  We took a taxi the half mile back to where we'd left the car and just went home.  I'd like to say it ended there but apparently my digestive system had been compromised and I polished off the morning with some carsickness on the drive out of the city.  And now Chad I both have bum knees because he wrenched his catching me as I fell.

But now we're home, safe and mostly sound with another geocache found and a (hopefully) entertaining story to tell.

The end! :D

Success at Last!

I finally found my first geocache in Japan!  For those of you who have no idea what a geocache is, it's a container hidden by someone with a GPS for other people to then locate with their GPS.  There are geocaches and people finding them all over the world, for lists of them and more information on what on earth I'm talking about, go here.

Chad introduced me to geocaching years ago, but he doesn't like to do it much anymore so these days I usually hunt them by myself.  He did get me a really nice GPS a year or two ago but unfortunately it didn't come with maps of Japan (I think there are some you can buy now but they can get pretty pricey).  No matter though, because now there is an iPhone app (made by the official site) that works really well.

This was not the first time I had looked for a cache here in Japan, I nearly got irretrievably lost in Ginza looking for one and risked a divorce trying to find one in Odaiba with Chad.  I prefer the method of geocaching whereby you look for them during the normal course of your day if you have some time to kill (the iPhone app makes this super easy).  This is also called "caching-for-numbers" because you can find a lot this way (i.e. run up your "found" number) but the downside is you can see some pretty boring caches in annoyingly crowded places.  Some people only cache when they can make an event of it and concentrate on the more interesting/isolated caches---this is more what we did when we first started geocaching.

At any rate, after our Krispy Kreme breakfast Sunday morning, Chad headed off to Akihabara and I fired up the app.  There are about a million geocaches in Tokyo and more throughout the rest of the country.  I can tell by the descriptions and logs (on the website) that Japanese people geocache too, but fortunately most of them are are written in English.

It took me about three minutes thanks to a good hint and a low difficulty level.

the cache

contents (I didn't take anything to move,
who knows when I'll find my next one)

signing the logbook...I realized while looking at this photo
that I dated it in August rather than October...I don't know
what I was thinking.  I noted it on the weblog later.

standing next to where I found it