The week had been hectic with so many slogging hours and skipping lunches and dinners. The ups and downs on personal front made it all the tougher. All the body wanted was sleep and rest and food.

At the same time, the mind was craving for a break - some hours free from all the worries, both personal and professional.

Giving preference to the mind, we decided to go to a nearby island named Nakonoshima (sorry but the spelling might be wrong here).

It was a pleasant trip to say in short. The short trip on bus and then on a ferry, followed by another bus ride on a curvy road made a good impression and a good start. If morning shows the day, our trip was going to be a memorable one – and sure it turned out to be so.

The moment we reached there, we were welcome by the fragrance or flowers and the breeze of the sea. The swings used by the children took me back to the old poem by R.L. Stevenson.

We located a place to sit at and kept all of our belongings at one place under the tree and started playing game with the tennis ball. I was never a good catcher but seem the long period of inactivity has made me even worse. Though I could manage to get hold of one or two high rising throws, most of them just happened not to find my hand my hand a safe place to stay in. Catch or no catch, the game was enthralling and though in between we turned our focus onto other types of games like hitting the nearest person with the ball or hitting the goal, we kept on turning back to the same ‘catch the ball’ moments. Some of us, in between turned to climbing the tree in monkeyish fashion. The activity of rope climbing, ditch crossing with swinging on the rope, walking on chained logs were the activities to be followed and in between we forgot that the locale we were in, were full of flowers and the beauty was oozing out of every nook and corner of the island.

Apart from the availability of vegetarian food – or unavailability of it, we had a real nice time at that place. But then in Japan, we always have issue related to food as vegetarianism is a concept, not very popular with the people.

After giving to the mind, all it wanted, it was time to turn to the need of the body and dedicate Sunday to sleep.