After the relatively easy day, traveling with a fun group and having entertaining conversations, there were only four of us at the Japan Rail (JR) station that morning. Instead of walking, we caught the rail to Choden station at from there walked to Temple 18. Though it wasn’t rush hour (as I understand [...]

If every other Henro from our hotel hadn’t been on the same bus, I might have felt a little guilty. But. We’d all had a shit-kicker of a hike, followed by a painful night with no AirCon (AC to me), a morning that started at 4am with a rooster I promptly named C’oq [...]

In retrospect, I’m really glad that I hiked the 10 miles to Temple Twelve. By this point, we were doing 10-12 miles a day, so the distance was never the issue to me. The mountain was my issue. To tell a tale out of sequence, I’m currently in Physical Therapy to fix my [...]

The only Western food I’d had since the flight (which was Asian Kosher) were the Quaker Oats granola bars I’d packed. My father had mocked me, initially, but as we all have a tendency to get grumpy when we don’t eat, and Boone is a diabetic, I felt they were needed. In the [...]

On our second day, we had a trek of 14.2km, which is just under 7 miles, and really isn’t all that far at all. At some point I stopped keeping track of kilometers and millage and all that sort of thing. It stopped mattering. We started out our day at 7am, following [...]

Last year my father and brother did the Henro trail alone, and along the way they met Sone-san and his son. As Sone-san only has 2/3rds of a heart, his wife doesn’t let him do the hike on his own. In this weird way, we’re doing him a favor by doing this with [...]

I jokingly wrote ‘O-Henro - A gaijin’s journey that does not end in enlightenment so much as family peace’ on the cover of my first moleskin. At the time I intended to write about what it was like to be a Jewish, American woman in Japan. In the end, I came to realize [...]

I’ve always wanted to backpack in a strange land. When I was in high school, I read a book by a fellow who walked the Trail of Tears backwards and then hitchhiked across the Pony Express route, from St. Jo’s to San Francisco. It impressed the hell out of me at the time, [...]

I’m still in Japan, still alive. We walked 23 temples on Shikoku and we’re reposing at Dad’s place for a couple days before I head home. I miss pizza.

I’m ‘blogging’ old school in a moleskin journal, however I’ve nabbed Dad’s laptop to assure the world that I am, indeed, alive. It’s muggy and beautiful. We leave tomorrow for Henro.