Chichibu National Park

Trying to catch up on the blog posts since last Saturday. Now that the state of emergency has been lifted, crossing state lines is generally acceptable now. We are just supposed to be careful and wear masks and reduce interactions with people. So we ended up driving down to Saitama Prefecture to a national park called Chichibu. We had to cross 2 state lines actually.

The real purpose for crossing into Saitama was to pick up a car I bought! But I will post about that later. So we took the opportunity to see Chichibu. Its actually pretty close to Mount Fuji, but we couldn’t see Fuji at all because it was so hazy. The park is known for its beautiful flower fields in the spring, but we were too late for those.

It was no beautiful flower field, but it was still pretty cool. There weren’t many people around so we got to sit and eat our 7 Eleven lunch in peace.

We walked around and found a character called “Potekuma”, which is the state mascot of Saitama I think. “Pote” is short for “potato” and “Kuma” means “bear”. So I guess he is the Potato Bear. We found his house, and the kids were so intrigued by it.