Friendship Festival

Hi all! We went to the Friendship Festival this weekend on base. It was FREAKIN' hot out! We were working a booth for the running club we just joined. They actually consider themselves a social club with a running problem - that works for me :) We were supposed to be selling t-shirt with some drinks, but all the money that came in was from Gatorade - it was the craziest thing. People were going nuts over it!

There were lots of different planes at the show. It made me think of our AK friends - miss you guys! Here was Patrick's favorite part of the event...

Oh The Insanity, Day 1

No, this is not a journal of how I’m losing my mind while on “unpaid sabbatical”; this is worse. After much deliberation (not really), we did it. We’ve signed up for the Tokyo Marathon. Many thanks to our running buddies from our first and only half-marathon who have given us the confidence, however misplaced it might be, to run such a distance.

We’ve registered for the event, but it will be on a lottery basis. Apparently the city can only handle 25,000 runners and already have too many registered. For those of you that know my luck with lotteries, here’s a great example. My friend Andrea and I were supposed to both run the Mount Marathon (a very strenuous 3 mile mountain race) this past spring, but she got in on the lottery and I did not. Patrick has already started contemplating the appropriate consolation prize required if he gets to run and I don’t!

We’ll keep you posted on the process. Today is day 1 of our training and we’ve survived. Only 183 days to go. Wish us luck!

Hiking Mt. Fuji with a few friends…

Our first weekend here and we hiked Mt. Fuji with some friends...

The Crew

And a few other people…

Yes, those are actually people. We were hiking from stations 5 – 10, an increase of about 5K ft (up to 12,387ft). The idea was to go on a night hike so we would reach the top of the peak in order to see the sunrise. We left station 5 at 8:30pm. It took us 4 hrs to get from station 5 to 8.5… and then we hit the wall… of people. It was like a Tokyo train station had migrated to the top of the 2nd highest single mountain on Earth. For FOUR HOURS, all we saw were the pants and shoes of the person in front of us!

We reached the peak just in time to see the sunrise at 4:30am. Spent a little bit of time up there, and then took about 3 hrs to get back to the bottom.

A few things we learned on our adventure:
1. Make sure that you don’t go on a Saturday…
2. Make sure that if you do go on a Saturday, that said Saturday is not a Holiday…
3. It really is about 50 deg colder at the top, and windy as all get out!
4. As the altitude gets you, you are more than willing to pay ~$2+ to get a stamp on your hiking stick… at every stop…
5. People actually hike Mt. Fuji in skirts, shorts, and flip-flops. These are the clinically insane…

We really did have fun, and recommend it to anyone that travels this way!

The Scenic Route...

Howdy from Tokyo! Those of you who know us, know that we never do anything the easy way. Hence the scenic route… the ongoing collection of our grand (and not so grand) misadventures that we seem to get ourselves into. That and just the crazy things that happen on a day to day basis! I hope you find entertainment in our entries, and feel free to leave comments!