Shizuoka Prefectural Forest Park and a Thunderstorm

My summer vacation is over and my first day back to school was this past Monday. I wasn't looking forward to going back to school after having 46 days in a row off (counting weekends), but it wasn't too bad.

This post is out of order because I was excited to post about more exciting things that I did, but the day before climbing Fujisan (in early August), Jonathan and I visited the Shizuoka Prefectural Forest Park in Hamamatsu.

We wanted to either visit the park or ride bikes that day and we decided to go the park since we didn't want to tire ourselves out before climbing Mt. Fuji.

The road to the park was winding and narrow but very pretty!

We took a trail to go the suspension bridge.

 I forget the exact height, but the suspension bridge is pretty high up! It's neat! :)

After the bridge we continued the hike for a little bit and it was actually pretty steep in parts. It was more of a hike than we expected and I think a bike ride would have been less tiring, haha. There are more trails there that I would like to check out sometime. I want to go back in the fall when the weather is cooler.

This has nothing to do with the Forest Park, but last night we had a thunderstorm! Last time I was in Japan I only saw one thunderstorm and it lasted like two minutes. It wasn't much except for the lightning that struck very close to my apartment and knocked out the electricity for about ten seconds. I also saw lightning in the distance a couple of times but it never amounted to much. But the storm last night was very strong. I was woken up suddenly by really loud thunder. I don't know if it was raining much or very windy, but the lightning was crazy. The thunder was SOOOO loud and lightning stuck very close several times. The thunder was really shaking my apartment. It was so loud that I jumped several times. I was excited that there was a thunderstorm but it was actually a little scary.

This past week I saw lightning several nights. A few times when walking back to my car from Jonathan's apartment we saw lightning in the distance but didn't hear any thunder. One night it stormed a little bit later on and there was quite a bit of lightning but it wasn't super close. I thought it rarely stormed here, but I guess it's more common than I thought. It's still not usually as strong as the storms I see in Kentucky, but the one last night was pretty crazy!