Friday was Culture Day in Japan and so it was a good three-day weekend to camping up in Nagano prefecture. It took us about 5 hours to drive up there since there's lots of mountains and so lots of winding roads to get there. Here's a picture of the campground and our campsite:
We were using our new tarp and camping table, which both worked very well for us:
Since we were up in the mountains, there was crystal clear water in the river beside our campsite that you could drink:
Here's some photos of us by the river. The leaves are just starting to change up there. They don't start changing in Hamamtsu until the end of November:
The reason we went to this area was to visit two historic towns called Magome and Tsumago. They are called 'post towns' which is meant to mean that they were towns that people would stop at years ago when they would travel by foot between Tokyo (then Edo) and Kyoto (then Kyo). The towns have been kept in their traditional style:
There are about 11 post towns that still keep their traditional style but these two are very popular since the are less than 8 km apart and so you can walk the original path between the towns, which we did:
This is at a shop along the way that sells special 'dango' which is a ball made from black sesame paste covered in a vegetable/rice ball covered with buckwheat powder as you can see in the second photo (yum yum):
Here's another spot along the way between the towns:
We stopped at two small waterfalls near each other. It seems that in this area, if 2 waterfalls are near each other, they call them the 'male waterfall' and the 'female waterfall'. Near our campground, there were 2 other waterfalls that used the same names. Can you guess which waterfalls is male and which is female?
By the time we reached Tsumago at 5 o'clock, it was already getting dark. So we got to have a quiet walk around the town at night time:
Here's a straw horse that was in the town:
It was definitely much colder in Nagano. It was nice during the day, but about 8 C at night or even colder since we were beside a river since we could easily see our breath at night. Still it was a fun camping trip (probably our last for the year).
While we were at the shrine:
we saw a numer of children who were dressed up to celebrate a special Shinto holiday, shichi-go-san. When a boy turns 3 & 5 and when a girl turns 3 & 7, they visit the shrine for a special ceremony to wish them a long life:
We then had fun walking along the river with beautiful trees:
and took a nice group hot together:
It was a nice wooded area and river we walked along in the valley. There were some nice bridges and waterfalls as well: 
Finally, we were able to find some red leaves:
And Ayako found a nice house she wants to live in:
Outside the restaurant, we met a friendly cat who loved being pet (and also drinking from the river):
We also stopped at a traditional tea house where we had matcha tea and nice sweets:
