Memories of Minami-Izu

We’ve been Izu Peninsula last weekend with wife and daughter.
Driving plan was as follows;

 

The final destination: Inn “Minami-Izu”
The distance to the final destination of the spa inn “Minami-Izu” is 166km.
We select the route as flat as possible since my car is the E/V (Nissan Leaf, Electric Vehicle).
In this route we stopped at the free quick charge station of Nissan dealer at 106km point.


Main event is to visit i-ZOO. i-ZOO is Japan’s largest zoo of reptiles and amphibian where we can directly touch not only turtles and armadillos but also snakes and lizards.http://izoo.co.jp/

My daughter is interested in the reptiles and she wanted to visit i-ZOO initially.
Nevertheless, she was scared and didn’t touch the snakes, etc.
Have you ever touched the snakes?

Snake’s skin is smoother and colder than I thought.
The most surprising discovery in my half century life is that it’s not wet and it doesn’t smell at all.

On the way to the inn, we visited a quiet shrine just besides of see coast.

We stayed at Inn Minami-Izu and enjoyed delicious fish dishes and nice open-air bath.

 

 

Other snaps are shown here! Look!!

 

Time flies

 

Time flies.
As for the Tokyo Ham Fair festival on 24 and 25 of August, refer to this page.
http://www.a1club.net/HAMFAIR/hamfair2013/index_e.html
That page shows all of my activity in the Ham Festival.

The day after the festival, I took K6RB, Rob to Asakusa and Akihabara area for a short excursion.
After that we went to the Thai Food Restaurant in Kuramae, Tokyo. JN1THL,
Ken and JR1CNO, Rich joined there. The restaurant is run by E21AOY, Wara.
Chat was fun and food was delicious.
Refer to my Japanese Blog page here;
http://cw.at.webry.info/201308/article_4.html

From 31 Aug to 1 Sep, I took part of the CW Open Contest.
Since I’m not a serious contest guy, I’ve managed to work about 20 stations in the session 2 and 3.
I still feel curious when exchanging the contest numbers without RST.
As I’m an old fashioned ham, I believe that we must exchange RST at least to approve the contact as a “QSO”.

Anyway, this summer was too hot and humid for me to stay at my tiny radio room at the 2nd floor. Therefore, my radio activity had been rock bottom.

In the middle of September, the typhoon swept away the hot atmosphere and dragged the cool air into the Kanto plain from the north.

The band condition on 40m in the evening time has also been getting better for DXing.
I’m very happy that the band is becoming a pretty good shape to make nice chat by CW with big bros in US.

Here is the record of CW QSOs with duration of more than 10 or 20-minute-long extracted from the log. Upper one is in September and the lower one is in August.
The data shows the change of condition from Summer to Fall.