Just to be super clear, I did not have to walk from Sky Terme Shibukawa to Midorinomura camp area.

Lin and I woke up for breakfast at 6:30, packed, then spent the morning driving around trying to get my handset working again.

Amazingly, the shop staff was able to reboot my phone with a llllonnnngggg press (18 seconds) of the power button. I thought I had “done everything” but apparently I hadn’t done that.

The phone kept rebooting, though, and never could get past the opening screen or so.

Looking up online, I found a Stack Exchange issue of something determining that low memory was causing his phone to reboot. I mentioned this to the staff so they offered to sell me a larger Micro SD card:

• 64GB for 9,700 yen
• 128GB for 17,000 yen

I had seen much better prices in Shibuya, so Lin drove to the local Yamada Denki where I got a larger Micro SD card:

• 256GB for 5,780 yen

I put the new card into the old phone but it still just kep rebooting.

Back to the phone shop to tell them the card did not help. They were super confusing. Here are the responses I understood over the hour we were there.

• “We can’t help you.”
• “We can loan you a phone.”
• “We can probably get you the same model here, today.”
• “We can’t get the same model.”
• “We cannot loan you a phone because we cannot reach our sibling shop near your house.”
• “We cannot loan you a phone because you have a 5G contract and we only have 4G phones.”

Good grief. Anyway, Lin and I gave up with them after an hour of this, plus calling the CSR line who were only able to “Send a phone to my house” and could not interfere with management of the local shop.

We ate lunch, then went to 金島温泉, which was small, cheap, clean(?), and fine, but got about 2 stars from me and low rating from Lin as well.

We finished around 4pm there which was too late for me to then walk to my place for tonight, so she is joining me in a bungalow at 緑の村キャムプ area.

I am a little bummed because this was to be the day I started walking up mountains, but I am also happy to receive a day off from walking.

Oh, and surprising to me, though my phone is stuck on a screen saying “Just a sec…” it can still receive calls on my phone number. That is a great relief; at least I have connection if people call me. I cannot make calls out, though.

Oh, I was able to print the maps for the next 6 days or so. Tomorrow I plan to start walking using paper maps.

Here was the plan for Day 10