The funny thing about taking a holiday by car, is that you can bring along just about anything you want. I loaded the trunk with books, art supplies, and enough clothes for everyone for the whole four days. Since there’s no washing machine at Yamani House (yet!) I figured this would be the easiest.

If I were to do it again, I would have packed less books and art supplies, but more food! We got in and were ready to eat something immediately, but I had only brought vaguely useful but not entirely edible things like coffee, tea bags, and dry pasta. We drove around looking for something to eat, wound up at the Michi no Eki where the soba was sold out and so instead had some (delicious! but not exactly lunch) sudachi gelato, and eventually surrendered to the local Sunkus convenience store where we crouched in the parking lot eating egg sandwiches and microwaved takoyaki.

Once our hunger had been taken care of, we were able to find a regular grocery store where we stocked up on practical things like potatoes, onions, carrots, rice, and chicken. Back at the house, we put some rice in the cooker, set it going, and left again to take a bath at the onsen. It takes about twelve minutes to get from the house to the onsen by car. I wouldn’t want to bike it. There is a ton of tasty stuff for sale in the gift shop of the onsen, so we bought some noodles with stir-fry sauce packets added, and brought those home to make a late-night dinner of stir-fried noodles, chicken, and veggies. It was pretty tasty and an easy one pot meal, and by the time we were done eating there was nothing left to do but to lay out our futons and go to sleep.