August, 2012 | WANISAN

Archive for August, 2012

A “Shining” type moment?

Saturday, August 18th, 2012

This week while we have a little time left, my wife and I took a trip up to the mountains.

We had a great trip, ate some really good food, saw some beautiful country, waterfalls, mountains, and rivers.

We also had a couple of very strange things happen.

One thing that happened was although we were 3 and a half hours from home, in a small mountain town, on a little backstreet, we met two of our students. That was very interesting. I know it’s a small world, but that was very strange. We stepped into a small restaurant to check out their lunch plate offerings and standing there doing the same were two students from our university and our classes.

That was a surprise, but not that strange, and certainly not a bad thing.

That happened elsewhere 😉

We stayed at the lodge our university owns up in the mountains. It’s built to handle mostly large groups – up to 180 or so people. However, this time of year it’s not so busy.

In fact, no one was there.

I mean no one.

There was one caretaker there – very nice guy, and very kind to us!

We ‘checked in’ and he told us he’d be leaving at 5 and how we could get into the building when we returned from having our dinner.

This lodge is in the mountains, almost a kilometer off the main road up on the mountainside at the end of a dead-end winding lane. It also has no television or internet. I know!

I’ll admit it was a little eerie, but I was up for it. I didn’t think I’d have a Jack Nicholson moment and start stabbing anybody at least 😉

Sulseob was a little less enthusiastic about it the more she thought about it.

It turned out great though. We had a breakfast reservation for 8am and sure enough, we woke up, heard some stirring around, and looked over the balcony into the dining area to see our breakfasts set out on the table. No people though…

It was a little strange, but all in all, not nearly as uncomfortable as I’d thought it might be with strange sounds in the night.

Here are a few photos of our lodge 😉

Tags:Balcony, Beautiful Country, Caretaker, Dining Area, Good Food, Great Trip, Half Hours, Jack Nicholson, Large Groups, Little Time, Lunch Plate, Mountains And Rivers, Mountainside, Nice Guy, Offerings, Sounds In The Night, Strange Sounds, Strange Things, Time Of Year, Waterfalls
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Kohnosu Golf Range

Saturday, August 4th, 2012

While Bynn and Ahn are away, we still wanted to go hit some balls (golf balls, okay?) and thought we’d take this chance to try out a different practice range.

We usually go to Arcadia out near Seto, and we like it. It’s just a little far from our house and the last couple of kilometers of the road are very narrow, so it’s a little inconvenient. Mostly, that road feels awkward at best, even dangerous especially at night, which is when we go most of the time.

Anyway, we went out to Tenpaku to a new place for us called Kohnosu.

It’s only 15 minutes from our house, a definite plus. The road is a main road, right up until you arrive. Also a plus.

It’s a little small though it is 2 floors. I think there were about 25 stations on each floor. It’s also narrow and only deep in the exact middle which is about where we were at No. 16.

Speaking of narrow. I’m pretty sure the individual stations also felt a little closer together than Arcadia. A smaller knit pick was the smoking area was almost directly behind us and it wasn’t a filtered room but an outside place.

Also you could only pay by the ball. It’s usually 12 yen per ball on weekdays and 14 yen per ball on weekends. No ‘uchihoudai’ (all you can hit on a time basis) which is the route we usually take. On top of that, you pay first for a set number – 100, 150 etc but the numbers were sort of odd. We got 247 or something like that. You also have to pay a 300 yen user fee.

On the positive side the atmosphere is very high class, and everyone who was using the range looked fairly serious, and of course, much better than me. Sulseob decided not to even hit because she felt a little uncomfortable with all of that though we originally intended for us both to take turns hitting.

They also had auto club speed and distance gages for hitting off the tee, but they didn’t work for when you were hitting irons off the mat.

Oh, there’s also water right out in front of you. That was kind of interesting. There were pitching targets on both sides of the water, and that was pretty interesting. Funny how just having that water there has such an effect. Of course, I think I was the only one hitting into it 😉

I’m glad we went and it was nice, but we probably won’t go back. I prefer the wider areas and ‘all you can hit’ fees at Arcadia.

Here are a couple of photos of the range, the equipment, and the desert 😉