She needs a down-day, she says, to prepare for her graduation and speech tomorrow. Acceptable, I suppose. Laura nonetheless made all the arrangments for the rest of us to take the train to see the teamLab Planets exhibit near Toyusu Station.
The young ones opt to stay behind this morning while Laura escorts my mom and I to visit her favorite places near Mejiro Station where she lived for a time.
We await the next train to ride south to Kamakura. These first mornings in Japan have been rough for the elders among us. The time difference is no joke.
I was awake before the hotel cafe opened this morning, with its amazing charcoal roasted coffee (sumiyaki), so I went out on my own for an emergency backup.
My mom says she’s been awake since some devil-hour like 3:00 AM. I don’t know how she’s alive.
We tried this once before, a family trip to Japan. Our flights were booked for June 2020. A pandemic intervened. Since then, Laura came back to Boise to work and prepare for graduate school then returned to Japan and is now about to graduate. So we try again.
“It’s the bourbon boys!” she exclaims, entering the Victorian Inn dining room where my brothers and I are quietly sipping coffee as we review the day’s route.
We were given dispensation by the bar last night to finish our whiskey flight upstairs in the guest lounge at our own slow pace. We chatted late into the night, occasionally sharing witty banter with the only other person in the room, a winsome lady catching up on office work. She’s happy to see we survived, I think.
My brother Joel and I had both been seeing YouTube videos of riders having terrific times along the California coast.
I had such a ride in mind since Shannon and I drove to some of her homelands around San Luis Obispo and I saw the many quiet and beautiful seaside roads there. A ride to the central coast needs more time than we have, at least at the pace we prefer. So instead we’ve decided to ride the northern coast.