Dave Brown

Zoom!

Chie told me that she wanted to spend the remainder of Golden Week (from here on) with her family rather than with me. To accomplish that, she told me she would be going to Sendai this evening.

I said, “Hey, well, if you’re going to do that, why don’t we make a bit of an adventure out of it anyway, and go up to Utsunomiya on my bike where you can catch the train from there to Sendai?”

She said, “That sounds like a fun little adventure,” so that’s what we did. I enlisted to come with, because Chie was a little concerned about me roaring about the countryside on my own (even though I do so quite often). Also, he tends to drive a little less, uh, exuberantly than I do, so having someone around to temper my driving style was a good thing as far as she was concerned. Chie tends to get anxious when I skip past a line of stopped cars to get to the front of the queue at a red light. If she saw how I dealt with traffic jams, she’d probably have a heart attack.

It was an awesome fun adventure. First of all, my navi routed us through a ridiculously-scenic part of Saitama—we all had trouble believing we were still in Saitama City, because we were going through these beautiful little areas with flower gardens, little family rice fields, gorgeous houses, wonderful things. I didn’t even want to go fast, because there was so much to look at—I was happy enouh just regarding my surroundings.

Then we finally hit the open road and went roaring along at a decent clip. There were interesting people on the road too—-for instance, there were four people on bikes that seemed to be color coded, as if they were a superhero team. called them that, but it was a fitting description: one was obviously Spider-Man, another was obviously a member of the Green Lantern Corps, and the other two simply had color codings that we didn’t know about yet.

Another character we spotted on the way up to Utsunomiya was The Ultimate Squid: an 18-year-old (or so) kid, riding a ridiculously overpowered motorcycle, wearing (I swear I am not making this up) shorts, a T-shirt, flip-flops, and of course, no helmet at all. When he caught me glaring at him, he gave me an aggrieved “What the hell is wrong with how I’m driving?!” look. I imagine he gave that look to quite a lot of people who were forced to share the road with him.

But then a bunch of kids decided to outdo The Ultimate Squid: I saw a teenager on a 125cc scooter, no helmet, with two passengers, also not wearing helmets, roaring around Utsunomiya. Apparently the police also have the day off today. Well, some of them.

After dropping Chie off at Utsunomiya Station to let her make her way to Sendai, we took the Tohoku expressway home. It was full of traffic jams. The first one was particularly amusing: it was caused by rubberneckers, gazing at the spectacle on the road going the other way. What had happened was that someone’s Harly had broken down (because that’s what Harleys do), and they had had to summon a truck to tow it home. But they’d also had to call an ambulance to take the victim of the Harley’s breakdown to a nearby hospital. Ironically that caused a great big traffic jam to happen in the opposite lane—everyone wanted to slow down to get a good look at the motorcycle accident.

There was another traffic jam on the road home, but it was a curious rolling traffic jam: traffic was moving quite fast, but everyone was really close to everyone else, which made the whole thing quite uncomfortable. Fortunately it dispersed quite far north of Tokyo, which meant that the ride home was pretty quick and comfortable.