Kate’s Quests

I’ve been meaning to get to this for a week now, but I’ve been busy and sick. I came down with a cold (probably from one of the kids on the bus) and have been stuffy and miserable ever since. Yesterday I ended up with a full blown nose bleed…I haven’t had one of those since I was 6-7? I remember standing on Gramma’s porch on the Fourth of July weekend (it was the house before Lakewood)…the one that had the REALLY big hill. I capitalize ‘really’ because it was absolutely enormous, at least it was up until I hit that growth spurt.

So for my birthday, DJ signed us up for an ITT (a base tour guided group) tour to Hakone. We got up at 4:30am, which really isn’t that much earlier than normal. Yes, we are that lame and go to bed at 9pm. Sometimes on the weekends we get really wild and stay up until 10:30. We really are that awesome. Anyway, we were supposed to meet the group at some club on the housing base which isn’t far from our house. The directions that the woman gave us to find the club were extremely wrong and we ended up driving around the entire base before I finally stopped and asked some random guys where this club was. So we pulled in about three seconds before the bus pulled up and amazingly got on. I say amazingly because the atmosphere in the car while driving around the base was not a good one. To say the least.

So, we got on the bus and headed out. Stopping for coffee at 8:00am we went into a convenience store. I love these. The Japanese really know what they’re doing here. They have these convenience stores everywhere. You can get pretty much any and everything. DJ and I got coffee from a machine that sang and showed you, via tv screen, the coffee making process. First the coffee gets pressed and then it steeps and then people take it over to some other machine and do some other things and then the machine hand takes the cup and sets it in the holder and there’s your coffee! It sounds lame now, but at the time it was freakin’ cool.

We arrived at the Hakone Shrine somewhere around 9:30am. You walk up to the bottom of the stairs and then have to climb to the top. I suppose it’s somewhat hard to see, but there I am, ready to get climbing! And there’s a picture of DJ on the stairs as well. It’s one of the oldest shrines in Kanto. And when you reached the top there was an offering place. I don’t know what it’s called, but you bow to the shrine, throw money in (usually 5 cents), clap twice or ring the bells and then once you are finished with your prayer you bow again. This is the area where you do that. I felt like a dumbass, but DJ and I did it just like everyone else. Some of the women on the bus were worried about praying to someone else’s God, but others on the tour assured them that they could pray to their own God and still bow to the shrine. (Insert eyeroll here) . Um, hello? But I digress.

Anyway, I have to insert this picture here, because I think it’s gorgeous. DJ took it with his camera phone. Actually most of these shots were taken with his or my camera phones. We were almost done at the shrine and had a couple of minutes before we got on the bus so DJ and I wandered down to the bottom of the steps and took a trail. We ended up at the water’s edge and took this shot. So calm and serene.

So, once we were finished at the shrine we boarded the bus again and drove down to the Pirate Ship. This was cute. There was a big iron pirate standing on the deck that everyone took pictures of themselves standing next to. Everyone, that is, except us. We were way too cool for that. We took the boat across Lake Ashi (a crater lake formed four thousand years ago) and got some great shots of Mt. Fuji. I guess when the lake is very still AND you’re in the right position, you can get some mirror images of Mt. Fuji in the lake. Sounds good to me! After we got off the boat, we climbed up a hill and got back on the bus. We drove a short distance to the Owakudani Valley. This is a crater left by Mt. Kami where sulfurous fumes and clouds of steam rise from the ground. There are warnings posted to not stay too long because these fumes can be DEADLY. They don’t mess around!

We bought a couple of sweets and got some lunch. We were told to get some black eggs while we were there. If you eat one, it’s supposed to add 7 years of life to the end of your life and if you eat two…14 years, etc. We skipped the eggs because DJ won’t eat them. Plus, standing in sulfur springs and eating eggs…uggh. The smell of the air alone is enough to turn your stomach. After about and hour and a half there we met up with the group and took a cable car to the bottom of the mountain. That was pretty neat.

Then we went to the Hakone Open Air Museum. This was fun. There was artwork from all kinds of painters and sculptors. Picasso, Rudin, and a bunch of others. There was even a place where you could stop and soak your feet in some hot springs. It was so crowded and busy that DJ and I skipped that part. Maybe next time. Picasso had a large part of the museum devoted to him and seeing his artwork was interesting. This photo isn’t of one of his works, but it was cool nonetheless. The museum was mostly outside but there were some indoor portions.

After this the group headed back to base, but DJ and I ditched the group and took the train to Tokyo because I wanted Indian food for dinner. This was probably a mistake. Getting to the train station was fine and we did well until we changed trains halfway there. DJ wanted to take the Romance train (a faster and quicker) train and figuring out that we didn’t pay twice, which we thought we had, was a chore. For awhile we thought we had paid double for this trip, but it ended up that we had to pay a lot extra for the tickets. So, in hindsight we probably should have just stayed on the original train, but it ended up fine. Then once we got to Shinjuku we bought a ticket to get on the Metro to take the subway to our stop in Ginza. However, we didn’t buy a Metro ticket, but a different kind of train ticket so we wandered the subway plaza for an hour or two trying to 1. figure out what we had done wrong and 2. figure out how to tell the woman that we needed our money back so we could buy the correct tickets. DJ gets very flustered and DOES NOT want to talk to anyone and I’m more than willing to look stupid trying to figure out how to get what I want. So that was a chore. But, we finally figured it out and got everything set and got on the right train to the right stop and DJ thought he remembered how to get to the restaurant, and after two hours of searching we finally found it.

We left the tour group at 3:00pm and finally found the restaurant at 8pm. I think we arrived in Tokyo between 5:30 and 6:00. I think if everything had gone smoothly and we had made the first Romance train like we should have, we could have been there and eaten our Indian food by 6pm. But…it was an adventure! We got home around midnight or 1am and fell asleep!

Again…there are many more pictures posted on Flickr, so check those out too!