Ogawara-ko Beach

I am a bit delayed with my blogging because of a strange Live Writer problem, but I think it’s all back to normal now.

As soon as crazy Misawa snow melted, we were ready for new adventures. Look at the date on the pictures below—April 21st. Merely three weeks before then, we had a huge snow storm dump on us several inches of snow. Nothing could stop the spring sun from warming up Misawa, so although it was still chilly, spring was slowly showing its face.

This particular Saturday we wanted to do something active together. Everyone in our family really enjoys biking. So we decided to go on a bike ride for a couple of hours. I must say Misawa doesn’t have great biking trails. I mean, I remember our Maple Grove parks in Minnesota and we don’t have anything like that here.

We do know of at trail, called Misawa Cycle Road, which goes through rice fields connecting a baseball field with Citizen’s Forestry Park. So this particular Saturday, we decided to bike this trail. The trail, I believe, is around 7 km one way, but we decided to shorten it by driving to about midway point, parking and then biking.

Robert, I, and Alex rode our bikes, Katya rode her scooter (we were resisting saying “I told you so” several times) and Mark was enjoying the view of Japanese nature from the trailer. We biked over 4 km from the place we parked our car to the Citizen’s Forestry Park. When we got closer to the lake Ogawaro, we left our bikes “somewhere in the forest” and walked over to the beach.

It was a beautiful day, so the kids immediately started digging in the sand.

 

Huge carrots for a snack (Alex is holding one in his hand) and fresh air=perfect.

“Can I plant some carrots, right here?”.

“Elephant Cage” is in the background.

“This year, my parents decided to skip Malaysia..but I think this Ogawara-ko beach will do”.

Apparently in the summertime, this is the place to be.

When Robert took this picture, he said that this area looked like it was taken from the 70s.

Wooden Kokeshi dolls.

They could have stayed there all day, but we still had to bike back. 

Our way back to the parking station was non-eventful, besides the smelly fields we had to pass. Kids didn’t whine one bit, which was very impressive.  By the end of our adventure we were quite tired—after all we almost biked 10 km…

The irony is that none of the pictures above shows us actually biking. And none of them shows our bikes... So for all you know, we could have just made the whole story up.

Have a great Friday, everyone!