Camping on the Atago River

Over the weekend, Ayako and I went on a camping trip about 70 minutes north of my home along the Atago River, which is nice and clear and very popular in the summer. Here's a picture of the river we were on:
We managed to get a small piece of land, almost like an island, to ourselves where we set up camp:
We did lots of swimming and had wonderful food to eat such as BBQ meat:
And yummy oatmeal raisin cookies Ayako made:
I also enjoyed the drive there and back where there are some nice narrow roads through the forests:
Finally, here is a shot of us at a look out point overlooking Hamamatsu:

Back in Canada

As many of you know, I was back in Canada last week...for a week. And here are some photos from my trip.
These photos are from the Orgill BBQ at my parent's house:
And here are all the cousins together:
Next, it was up to the cottage for some relaxing to be done:
Unfortunately, it wasn't all relaxing since a tornado had come through 2 weeks ago and there was some cleaning up of trees and branches to be done. Luckily, there was no damage down to out cottage. Here's some pictures from all of the havoc:
Robin, Insung and Adam joined us up at the cottage and on the way back, we stopped at the zoo in Peterborough to look at the animals, go for a train ride and play in the playground: We finally had a BBQ back at our house in Peterborough and took some group shots then.

Karaoke & fireworks

To add a new twist to going to the fireworks this past weekend, we all dressed in yukatas and went to sing karaoke in the afternoon before the fireworks: After that, we got on the train and took a 20-minute train ride to a nearby city for their fireworks display. This one is the largest our area with 30,000 fireworks being set off (10 times larger than the average). It felt like a finale for the entire 2 hours of the fireworks and of course the actually finale was even better. Hopefully soon, I'll be able to put up a video of the finale that I can get from a friend.