If you read the last post you might think I have a rather loose idea of what the word tomorrow means. I haven’t posted the rest of my Ehime pictures up till now because I wanted to find an easy to use plugin for wordpress that would enable me to embed simple slideshows of my pictures without using a third party website. Having been stung by the sad demise of bubbleshare I’d rather not get stung again. However, though I tried a variety of plugins, I found they were either over-complicated, required too much coding, or just didn’t do a satisfactory job. I spent several hours experimenting and then gave up, swore a little, and decided to use slide.com instead. I think it works alright but I’m open to other suggestions…
Anyhow, getting back to our Ehime trip… Last Tuesday, Mewby and I awoke in our little cottage in Kumakogen’s Furusato Folk Village and after a simple breakfast of sata andagi we’d bought in Matsuyama the day before, we went for a walk.  By a little mill-pond we found some hungry ducks…

After that we took a taxi to see a big rock called 御三戸嶽 (which I think is pronounced Mimidodake) at the village of Mikawa and were impressed by its size and girth. Personally, I was expecting just a rock (and not really looking forward to it),  but this really was a humongously huge and very impressive rock. One that commanded respect and awe.

Whilst in Mikawa we lunched on some of the local speciality soba noodles. Very nice…

And then back to the folk village. We walked up to the planetarium and asked about our reservation at the observatory that night. At first we thought we would be out of luck as it had clouded over and they told us the observatory would be closed but they called us up an hour later and miraculously, the skies having cleared a bit we were able to get a look at the twinkly heavens and there was a nice and knowledgeable chap who told us what we were looking at (Altair, Deneb, and Vega).

Our heads full of stars we walked back in the dark to our little cottage for a nice dinner of hot potatoes and cream cheese, broccoli and shrimp in mayonnaise, with pan-fried salmon and eringi shrooms and a big old bottle of champagne I’d been saving up. I cannot tell you how well salmon and eringi suit each other. And then we went outside and turned our flashlights into lanterns and lit candles and let off fireworks and had the rest of the champagne… And ended the evening with senkou hanabi (線香花火). Do you know senkou hanabi? They are very small small teeny tiny fireworks and they are curiously fascinating. Here’s a video.