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- Change pageconfig.parent from '/tracker' to '/trips/japan-korea-2026/dailies' - Move japan-korea-2026 demo entries to docs/demo/trips/japan-korea-2026/dailies/ - Add Italy 2025 (Tuscany Gravel) demo trip: 5 entries with real Tuscany coordinates, plus trip.md, map/stats/stories stubs, and 3 GPX routes Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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title, date, template, published, hero_image, lat, lng, location_city, location_country, weather_temp_c, weather_desc
| title | date | template | published | hero_image | lat | lng | location_city | location_country | weather_temp_c | weather_desc |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sakura in Ueno Park | 2026-03-26 10:00 | entry | true | 35.7155 | 139.7753 | Tokyo | Japan | 14 | Partly cloudy |
I arrived at Ueno Park at ten in the morning thinking I would beat the crowds. I was wrong. Several thousand people had the same idea, and the same Instagram instinct. But here is the thing about cherry blossom season in Japan — the crowds are almost part of it. Families with picnic sheets. Couples with matching outfits. Office workers in suits sitting on blue tarps eating convenience-store onigiri. Everyone doing the same thing: looking up at the same trees.
The blossoms were at maybe seventy percent. Enough to understand what the fuss is about.
I walked the park from one end to the other and then sat under a particularly generous tree for about an hour just watching people react to something beautiful. There is a Japanese word for it — hanami — which translates roughly as "flower viewing" and is more or less an entire cultural practice. You do not rush past the blossoms. You sit with them.
Later I found the Tokyo National Museum at the top of the park. Three floors of Japanese history, almost entirely in Japanese, which I cannot read, but context is its own language. A display case of Edo-period swords. Painted screens showing mountains I now recognise. A reconstructed tea house in the garden, closed for the season but visible through the glass.
Dinner: tonkatsu on a side street off Ueno-Okachimachi station. The woman who runs the counter has been there for at least thirty years by the look of it. She refilled my miso soup without being asked, twice.