100 Miles and First State Line

We made it past Georgia and into North Carolina, our first state line crossing:

We also have not yet been eaten by bears, though we've seen quite a few warnings and made sure to hang our food well:

Mile 100 (we're currently at ~106) is near the top of a fairly steep climb, Albert Mountain in North Carolina, but it offers a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains (that we are becoming very close friends with):

We spent a day in Franklin, NC to recuperate and regroup a bit, but will be burning up the miles (we hope) and posting again in a few days, just before we hit the Smokies. Should be gorgeous!

Weather

So far, we've hiked mostly in glorious cool and sunny conditions, perfect for getting in the miles:

We've also hiked through a fair bit of rain and fog, and one night just made it to a campsite as a thunderstorm began (didn't stop to take pictures):

Surprisingly, we also had some snow, which we knew was a possibility this month but were hoping we wouldn't hit any:

It made for a very cold night, especially as we were way up on a mountain in our little 3-season tent, luckily with enough gear to not be (too) worried about our safety. One of the other hikers who was in the shelter rather than tenting said his thermometer read 20 degrees Fahrenheit! We piled on all our clothing and headed down the mountain, happy we were headed for a town since the next night was supposed to be even colder.

What Now?

So. The blog. We started this blog to keep everyone informed while we were in Japan and to act as a journal of sorts for our adventures abroad. Now that we're no longer living abroad, we'll still blog interesting things we get up to, like house remodeling, adventuring, places we visit for conferences, and major life things (kittens!), but if you're not family or friends, you may not want to follow us around anymore. Posts will be infrequent, since as grad students we don't anticipate doing blog-worthy things too often. At least, we assume no one else will be as fascinated by the research methods, papers, and statistics we'll be dealing with.

Grad school starts in August. It's April. We've got time for one more adventure! For the next four months, we'll be attempting to hike the Appalachian Trail. Hopefully we'll make it from Springer (in Georgia) to Katahdin (in Maine) and we'll be checking in when we can along the way. That won't be often, but we'll have a Google Map of our progress as well as posts whenever we can stop in a town to upload our pictures and write about where we've been. Thanks for reading!

We'll put a round of pre-actual-trail pictures in this post too.

Pretty much everything plus at least six days worth of food, spread out on the floor.

The bags weighed in at 32 and 35 pounds (Ana / Lee), including food and a liter of water each.  To completely fill the water tanks would add an additional six pounds to each bag, but we won't have to do that unless we're passing through areas with fewer water sources than normal.  The volume and weight of initial food is considerable (~15lbs), but will thankfully decline as we eat it, making it less of a chore to get everything in the bags and to carry them. 

The official "start" pictures in full gear, etc, will be in the next post, which might be some time coming, since we can only get to the internet when we find a hotel with a PC available to use. We started on the 15th, and the weather is looking fantastic. Wish us luck!

Appalachian Trail

We're somewhere between Georgia and Maine, walking the ~2200 miles of the Appalachian Trail. We'll be updating sporadically, but please check out Flickr for photos along the way - we're using public computers when we can get time on them.

Springer Mountain, April 15th

Wish us luck!

We bought a house!

Friday, April 13th (appropriate, no?), we closed on our very own house. It's an older house, built in 1920 and it needs a bit of updating to make it into what we want, but we've got a place to live that's only a few miles from school, in a nice neighborhood with kids and dogs and similar small older houses, and we are now homeowners. Weird.  Did we miss the part where they handed out licenses to be adults?

Here are some "before" pictures, photos of the house as it is now, though we're planning to at least re-do all of the wallpaper, sand and refinish the floors, do the same for various gorgeous wood window frames and edgings, and pull up the carpet in the fireplace room (not sure if it'll be living room, den, or knitting room yet!). It'll take a lot of work on our part, but we figure that it will give us a good long-term project outside of school work, for when it isn't time for sleeping but we can't brain any more.

Nice corner lot, decent neighborhood, some yard work to be done.

 The stuff we don't get to keep.

 Is fully appliance'd, our inspector says that they work, too.

 Den has some nice built-in shelves, pity they're not quite deep enough for books.

 There is some wallpaper that we'll have to eradicate, and we're thinking hard about refinishing all the floors.

 We're pretty happy with the layout - overall the place is pretty nice.

Currently, it's a little...pink, with a lawn that was full of flower beds and a nice ivy groundcover under the shady mature trees, but the yard needs some TLC and the house needs de-pinking and -wallpapering. It's got a nice open layout, rooms that make sense, not too many closets but a lot of storage in the basement and attic, a good-sized garage perfect for car plus working/storage area and bikes, and most importantly, it's still quite solid with good lines and no major problems. It is mildly radioactive (radon is quite high), but high radon levels are (and will soon be) easily fixed.

Anyway, we bought it, and this adventure really begins in earnest in the fall.  Next up, well, the next big adventure.  It is REAL big.

Our Next Step: PhD's

As many of you may know, we've been planning to go back to grad school for our PhD's after we finish here in Japan. We've both found the area of engineering education at all levels (pre-K and up) to be a very interesting area to research, and reasonable to make careers in. We have very distinct target areas of study within the field (education is a huge, huge area, and engineering education is fairly multidisciplinary) but we are definitely looking to do research-based education work. To more fully understand the research craft and apply the problem solving and design methodologies of engineering to the area of education, professionally, we need to go back to school.

Being contractually obligated in Japan for a couple of years, we had plenty of time to study our areas of interest and schools that offer appropriate PhD courses and programs. We found that Purdue University was really the #1 school for our purposes, beating the competition in virtually all areas and aspects we could assess. Under those circumstance, Purdue became really the only school we wanted to go to, so last March we visited their Open House to be darn sure we knew what we were signing up for. We came away deeply impressed, and our intentions became plans, which are now becoming reality.

GRE exams were taken (and blown out of the water, I might add), letters of recommendation were requested, application essays and documents were written, re-written, edited, re-edited, edited again, ad nauseum, and applications were due December 15. We waited with bated breath and increasing tension until we were notified that we have both been accepted to the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University and will be getting paid to work on things we are very interested in. Classes there will start in August, and we're very, very excited to be back in the US with such a great opportunity in front of us. We've got some pretty serious adventuring being planned for the summer, but we can now say that at the end of all that, there will be a long, hard, sleepless, brain-twisting PhD-bound road in front of us, and by golly it looks fantastic.

Things We'll Miss About Japan

 ...in the order we came up with them:

1. Really cheap shipping. It cost about $6.50 to overnight meat from our internet butcher halfway across the country, and roughly $3 to overnight this from Amazon:

2. No tipping. If you're in a restaurant, you don't have to wait for your server, any server will help you out because they're a team of well-paid workers who don't have to grovel for tips. No trying to figure out what you should pay, and no wondering which types of workers have tips factored into their income (hair stylists) or not (some delivery men).

3. Public transportation. All kinds. We've been able to jump on a train to get where we want to go, anywhere in the country, pretty much any day of the week and for most places, any time of the day, for a reasonable (not cheap) price. Airlines are also easy. One-way is one price, and round-trip is almost always double that. Even taxis are better, the doors are automatic and they have a service where they will bring two drivers, one in the taxi, and one to drive your car home, for not much more than a typical taxi fare.

4. Health care. Insurance is mandatory, and while many clinics and practices are private, prices are pretty much set by the government for various services. You pay for 1/3 of your visit and can go anywhere, any time, because your insurance works everywhere. There are assistance programs for the elderly and others who can't afford that much, but I paid roughly $65 for two MRIs of my knee and some pills. Not bad at all.

5. Simple Prices. There are taxes on things, but everything costs what it says it costs, tax is factored into the price of the item. Typically, it's priced so that it's a nice, even number with tax as well.

6. ATMs. This is a cash-based society (mixed blessing), so the ATMs are fairly advanced. You can, on the same machine, withdraw cash and coins, put in a card for a different account at a different bank, and deposit that same cash and coins of any denomination into the second bank account.

7. Customer Service. Here, they take "the customer is always right" to another level. At one restaurant, I put on a shawl and the server immediately ran over to close the windows so I wouldn't be cold. You pretty much always get pleasant service with a smile. Also, things like package delivery are great because if you miss them, you can call them right away and they'll redeliver your package that day, even from the Post Office. Of course, it helps that everyone is living so close together so going from the Post Office to do the rounds and back again can be a fairly quick run, and this service probably wouldn't work so well in suburban USA.  One caveat - if the service isn't outstanding there is a good chance that it will be strange or creepy instead.

8. Dramatic Terrain. Lots of scenic natural beauty, pretty much everywhere. On a clear day, you can see a mountain range from just about anywhere I've been in Japan. The coastline is also amazing. Of course, the small size of the country has a lot to do with that, but it is still nice.

9. Fresh fruits, vegetables, and chicken. Japan places a lot of emphasis on seasonal everything. You can get seasonal beers, some foods like candy are season-specific, of course fruits and vegetables are best in-season, and you can even find seasonal milk. While the zucchini season the first couple of years was much too short for my taste, the fruits and vegetables you can find here can be simply amazing. Strawberries are grown in greenhouses, so are in season February through April and are probably the best strawberries I've ever eaten (Edit: Lee agrees, equal to field grown NH berries). Everything is usually very fresh and flavorful, even if variety tends to be lacking (no parsnips, fresh raspberries, pumpkins, tart apples, many fewer choices overall). The chicken is also top notch in size, flavor, juiciness, and pretty much any metric you'd want to compare, except that you can't get anything but breasts, boneless thighs, and wings. Grocery stores are also common enough where you pass near at least one walking home from work; we'll miss being able to run in and grab fresh things for dinner so easily.

10. Appreciation. We appreciate the US a lot more now that we've been in Japan for so long. A root beer is no longer just a beverage option when you're in the mood, but a sublime experience. Shopping in any grocery store is heavenly, and I'm not sure I could handle a Wegman's run now - sensory overload. Large portions of red meat, a whole aisle of cereal products, a wide variety of vegetables that aren't locally in season, and raspberry flavored anything-I-want? Bliss! Sure, there are some foods, like okonomiyaki, katsudon, and delicious, delicious sushi that I will miss from Japan, but you can get nearly all the required ingredients at most grocery stores or Asian markets, and the rest are on the internet. The appreciation for these things probably won't last forever, but we'll enjoy it while it lasts!

March Vacation 2012: The Last Island

We wanted to at least set foot on Shikoku, the last of the four main islands of Japan, before leaving the country. If we had a few more days, we would have done some hiking to see the famous vine bridges and the supposedly gorgeous Iya Valley, but the book said if we went that deep into the countryside there might not be any buses back out to the train lines.  That didn't sound ideal.  We therefore settled for an old castle and, according to the signs we saw, the oldest hot springs in Japan. Both of these were completely accidental finds on our quest to just get to the island and find a hotel for the night.

Hiroshima (on the main island of Japan, Honshu) is quite close to Shikoku, and a full day's train ride from Kagoshima, so we stayed there for a night and then took the ferry across to the city of Matsuyama on Shikoku the next day. We didn't want to use a train pass that day, so we stayed in the Matsuyama area. We left finding a hotel to the last minute for this place, trying to see if camping would be an option, and ended up taking one of the few available hotels in a town near Matsuyama called Dogo Onsen. We were fairly unimpressed by the pricing of the available hotels, and less impressed by how ours looked when we got there. It was small and a little sketchy.

That evening, we decided to take a look at what local attractions could be found, since we didn't really do so before arriving. Most visitors to Shikoku are interested in seeing some (or all) of the 88 famous temples around the island. This is a popular pilgrimage, a six-week jaunt around the island, stopping at every shrine to pray. We found a fairly impressive (somewhat stereotypically stair-filled) temple near the hotel:

We were not particularly interested in the temples. Maybe an expert can enjoy dozens of different temples, but for us they all blur together after a while, and we've seen plenty. We found the main attraction of Dogo Onsen a block and a half away from our hotel, explaining the pricing.  The main attraction of Dogo Onsen is "the oldest hot spring in Japan":

We felt more like food than a bath, so we wandered about town looking for dinner. We thought this would be pretty easy in such a tourist zone, and were particularly interested in getting some yakuniku, or cooking thin strips of meat over a grill at your table. Unfortunately, we couldn't find such a place, or very many options at all in the touristy area because most of the hotels were full ryokan, offering breakfast and dinner for guests. There were not many freestanding dinner options. After wandering up and down the streets and even trying the back alleys looking for something more to our liking than simple noodle or rice bowls, we wound up walking into an unassuming sandwich shop.  It turned out to be enormous inside and there we found some of the best burgers we've had in Japan along with some locally brewed beer. Excellent dinner, and again, something we managed to luck into:

In the morning, we did go for baths at the old hot spring, and despite the age of the outside of the building found that the baths themselves were made of carved stone, were in good shape, and were of pleasant temperature and composition. In addition to the onsen, there was a local castle that was not bombed during WWII. This castle was between our hotel and the train station, and made for a perfect morning trip before catching an early train across the island. In order to get to the castle, you had to either walk up a small hill or pay to ride up to the top. We wanted to catch a specific train and maximize time spent at the castle, so opted for mechanized transport. This was a one-person chairlift over some lovely blooming cherry trees:

The castle walls were pretty impressive, and the day was simply gorgeous for viewing the castle:

The cherry blossoms, while not at their peak, were certainly out and about on many of the trees around the castle. In Kanazawa and for most of Japan, we were likely to miss them this year, so were quite happy we got to see them a few times around the country. Artsy cherry blossom/castle shot:

 
This particular castle, while not bombed during the war, was struck by lightning at least once and had additional mishaps along the way, so was mostly not original. Still, the replica was impressive, the internal museum pretty good, and the view from the top of the tower was amazing:

We finished off our adventures in Mastuyama with a cone of ice cream, flavored with a notable local variety of orange, before taking the train to our next hotel in a small town where we mostly dealt with paperwork.

For some more shots of the castle and other things, check out Flickr.  This is out last post of adventure in Japan.  There is one more Japan-related post after this, where we talk about some things we liked and will miss.

March Vacation 2012: Yakushima

One of the main goals of our March trip was to set foot on the other two main islands of Japan (Kyushu and Shikoku) that we had not yet been to.  Just off the tip of Kyushu is another island called Yakushima that we'd noticed in our 'Hiking in Japan' guide and wanted to visit - this being our last chance, and being near Kyushu, we made Yakushima a big part of our trip.

Getting to Yakushima requires either flying in from Osaka or Kagoshima, or (and more cheaply) taking a ferry from Kagoshima to Yakushima. We decided to take the train down to Kagoshima using our unlimited passes, stopping in Hiroshima for a day to break up the over 24 hours of train riding that it would require to get there. We stayed in Kagoshima for the night and took an early ferry the next morning so we'd have enough time to hike out to our campsite:

Yakushima is famous for its old trees, many of which have hiking trails leading up to them and individual names. Most of these trails are not particularly short, as enormous trees located close to settlements get cut down. One trail crosses the entire island, up and over the mountains, and takes roughly 3 days but it isn't something you should do until at least April due to the possibility of snow and extreme temperatures in the higher reaches. Since we were traveling in March, that was not a good option. Another possibility is the most common way to the most famous of the trees: a roughly 4-5 hour hike along an old train track most of the way in, and then another hour or two of hiking in rather rough terrain to get to the tree itself. We came up with a less-common combination of trails for a 12-ish hour round-trip hike through two different recommended areas with famous trees not normally incorporated into the same hike, through some woods instead of along a train track, with more hills and rougher terrain. We wanted to see more, and could afford to spend more time on the trail as we were camping in a shelter and did not need to be back to town and a hotel at the end of a day.

The ferry goes to that town down there, and then we took a bus into the mountains to the trailhead.

Yakushima is rainforest, and the guidebook said "It will rain" but it was sunny and clear the whole time.

Lots of moss on stones and trees, tons of streams.

Stumps big enough to stand in.

We started encountering impressive trees quickly.

As we got deeper into the forest, we began encounter very wild wildlife - humans obviously just didn't compute for them, and they're very calm around people but also don't think we have food.  Their calm allowed for some fairly spectacular pictures in some cases.

Being a Japanese hiking trail, as mentioned in the last post, there were stairs. Truly prodigious quantities of stairs, especially as we got close to the most famous tree, probably put in because the tens of thousands of people who visit the famous tree every year would really do a number on the terrain if not kept off it on a raised path:

We got to the shelter later than anticipated, due at least partly to stopping to take pictures of wildlife and appreciate the natural beauty, so it was pretty dark as we cooked some oatmeal for dinner and set up our gear in the cement hut near the main attraction:

In the morning we headed back out past some of the famous trees it had been a bit too dark to fully appreciate the day before. The most impressive one, Jomon Sugi, which is somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000 years old (different experts disagree), is right near the camping hut, so we breakfasted just after sunrise at the tree. This tree is massive, over 25 m (82 ft) tall, and 5.2 m (17 ft) in diameter:

We opted for a slightly shorter way out, down and over the train tracks rather than up and down the hills back to the trailhead we started at. We didn't want to be stuck with the last ferry back to Kagoshima, so the shorter path out seemed best.  There were some very scary no-guardrail bridges over chasms to cross - didn't take many pictures because it was best to get those over with as quickly as possible - I didn't want to contemplate the situation and then freeze up.

This one is cute and small and has railings and was not scary.  Others were longer and only had the board located between the rails and no railings at all, and those were scary.

As a bonus for choosing the different path out, we encountered a troop of monkeys and got some great pictures, including one of a monkey eating cherry blossoms.

We got quite a few pictures of the troupe of monkeys in this area, with a park right next to a large bridge over a stream with some of the largest rocks we've ever seen. Another monkey (or maybe the same one) crossed the very windy bridge towards us, also allowing for good pictures:

The bridge to the end of the trail

While we got to the end of the trail at the worst time for buses (most people opt for the day-long hike, no buses in the middle of the day), we were lucky enough to be able to hitch a ride out with the local park station-minding guy who was just finishing his shift, allowing us to grab some lunch at a bakery and catch the earlier ferry instead of being stuck at the trailhead for 3-4 hours. While it rains there most days of the year, we had perfect weather the entire time and were really glad we decided to go. I highly recommend scrolling through the rest of the pictures on Flickr; we got some really good ones!

In the next blog post, we accidentally visit major tourist attractions on Shikoku.

March Vacation 2012: 2000 Miles By Train

For our last month in Japan, we opted to leave the apartment halfway through and take vacation time as usual instead of using the vacation days to pack and get everything dealt with. For major student breaks (March, August, and Christmas), the Japan Rail company offers Seishun 18 passes, 5 days of unlimited train riding for a fixed price of roughly $130.  The catch is that you can only use local trains. This is an excellent deal if your schedule and sanity allow for being on the trains for long periods of time - easily 90% off for the schedule we laid out, traveling all the way to the southern tip of Japan and back again, with some side trips, taking ten days total. We ordered a whole bunch of new books, printed off some daunting train timetables, and hit the road, or rather, the rails.

Our general schedule:

Day 1: Train to Hiroshima (12 hours)
Day 2: Visit Hiroshima and Miyajima
Day 3: Train to Kagoshima (southernmost tip of Kyushu, the south-most main Japanese island) (13 hours)
Day 4: Ferry to Yakushima, hike and camp there (Documented in the next post)
Day 5: Hike back to ferry, return to Kagoshima by ferry (Documented in the next post)
Day 6: Train to Hiroshima (13 hours)
Day 7: Ferry to Shikoku (another island of Japan)
Day 8: See things in Matsuyama/Dogo Onsen (In the post after the next post!), train to other side of Shikoku (4 hours)
Day 9: Train to Osaka (3 hours), dinner at all-you-can-eat Brazilian Barbecue
Day 10: Train to Kanazawa (5 hours)

What did we do with all that train time? Well, Ana finished one sweater and most of a second one, along with a pair of socks, and read a couple of books. Lee added up how many pages he'd read over the trip at the end and was surprised to find that he'd gone through more than 4,000 pages in the books we'd brought with us.  The time on trains was fairly enjoyable for most of it, with the distractions.

We've already visited Hiroshima, Miyajima, and Osaka (2), so won't be talking too much about those, but will post about our trip to Yakushima, home of some very, very old trees, and Shikoku, home of one of about three castles in Japan with some original medieval-era structures standing, and one of Japan's oldest hot springs.

Trip highlights included French Toast in a cup:

Unlike WALL-E's Cupcake in a Cup, this is actual pieces of pretty good French Toast, served in a cup, with maple syrup and whipped cream.

An actual steam engine (we didn't get to ride it, but seeing it was cool):

And Hiroshima Style Okonomiyaki, one of the foods Ana will miss from Japan:

We visited Miyajima to climb Mt. Misen and have some of their amazing oysters again as well. The deer were everywhere, as always, and since we had the Big Camera this time, we were able to get some better shots of them:

We hiked up a different path than the last time, a stair-filled path full of large rocks and impressive man-made walls:

We did not visit the famous red torii (gate) this time, but got some pictures of it from the ferry and from the mountain. When the tide gets low, everyone files out to take a picture by the torii itself:

Ana is not a fan of stair-like terrain while hiking, and the Japanese love rocky staircases as we've learned through our other hikes here. Upon reaching yet another set of stairs, Ana demonstrated her Muppet Flail of defeat:

Award for least practical hiking footwear given to these two, seen near the top of the mountain.

Despite being labeled the "Muppet Flail of Defeat" (her words) she did make it to the top just fine.

 And back to the bottom for the oysters.

 Even the deer wanted some.

The hike up gave us a good chance to stretch our legs between very long days on the train - we were very happy we decided to visit Miyajima and Hiroshima one last time. More pictures, including extended Muppet Flail action, on Flickr.  The next post will be about our trip to Yakushima, and has sweet pictures of monkeys.