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The alarm went off at 3:45am. The bed was warm and cozy. "Do you really want to do this?" it asked.
"Not really," I replied, considering refluffing my pillow falling back asleep for at least 4 hours.
One of the nice things about Japanese hotels is that shower function is secondary to the bathtub function. A nice hot bath beckoned compared to a quick much less satisfying rinse under the shower. No time for such luxery.
The entire hotel seemed asleep as I crossed the lobby at a little after 4am. The sea of shining faces that manned the front desk were gone. No doubt someone was sitting in a back room looking at a camera and would arrive at the front desk before any customer who approached it. The information desk, where they would answer any question with ease, was similarly vacant. I am pretty sure if you asked them a question that had no answer the general manager would soon be apologizing in person that they couldn't find an answer.
Even the cab driver first in line at the cab stand was sound asleep. Sleeping in public is a surprisingly common occurrence in Japan. From people nodding off on the trains to truck drivers asleep at lunch in their trucks. Sleep appears to be an elusive prey that needs to be captured whenever possible.
The second cab driver was awake and I got in. I was no doubt going to be the ubiquitous vending machines best can of hot coffee customer today. Tsukiji fish market is on the Sumida River in Tokyo. It is the largest seafood market in the world. They claim 2,000 tons of over 450 types of seafood is handled there daily. From what I saw they could have said 20,000 tons and I would have believed it. Every morning there is a tuna auction. If you get there early, by 4:30 at the latest you can take a tour or the auction. There are about 70 slots or so and when it fills it fills. First come first serve.
This is why I had gotten up at 3:45. This is why I had taken a 40 dollar cab ride instead of waiting until 5 am when the trains started to run and paying 1.50 on one of the best train systems in the world. To see a tuna auction.
A large part of me knew that it wasn't worth it. Wasn't worth getting up 4 hours earlier and paying much more to get there. At the time I didn't even know what the tuna auction would entail. The ever helpful information desk just told me I needed to be there by 4:30 at the latest if I wanted to see it.
When you travel you can always tell just how "touristy" an adventure you are having by the ratio of tourists to people who live there. I can tell you that the only people from Tokyo or even Japan that were there for the tuna auction that cold morning were escorting foreign guests. English with an American accent was the most common language. A bit of Spanish, some French, a couple of Chinese, and two people speaking Russian or some other Eastern European language.
We waited in 4 lines with one approximately 27 inch tv sitting on a stand about shoulder high in the front of the room. The tv was showing a program about the market that had been filmed in Japanese for NHK, the national tv company, and translated into English. It was an interesting program but you needed to be in the front of a line to see and hear it. I was about 1/3 of the way back and only was able to catch parts of it. Out of all the crazy people there wearing our issued safety orange vests, that would make it easier both for the workers zipping around on the various lifts, carts, and people mashers to keep from mashing us and easier for the guards to escort us with like neon sheep, out of all these people I was the only one as far as I could tell to make the trip alone.
With a half hour to wait, I was able to think about what I was doing up this early, standing in line soon to be escorted to see a "famous" tuna auction of which I had no idea of what to expect and really no expectations. It was because I could. When is the next time I am going to be in Tokyo able to sleep walk through the rest of a day after seeing the Tsukiji tuna auction? The point of travel is to do and to see. Even if it means getting up at a ridiculous hour and dodging people mashers loaded with giant fish in the predawn hours.
To be continued with harrowing tales of tuna auction behind the scenes backstabbing and cut throat bidding.
Since I promised the bit about Florida Being flat.
George and I rented a Neon. I did not yet know it but it was a super Neon.
Our first stop on our interim road trip was in Las Angeles. We visited friends who were moving back to LA from Miami. In the two days we spent with them their cars and furniture showed up from the move.
Because there was no furniture at our friend's house we spent almost no time at the house. We arrived went out to dinner came back crashed on patio furniture cushions borrowed from the neighbor.
The next morning we woke up and the neighbor came over. My friends had lived in LA previously in this same house. They never sold it instead renting it out for the few years they were gone. When they moved back they already knew most of the neighbors who were the same.
Including the neighbor who used to babysit for their oldest child. She came over to visit first thing in the morning. She looked exactly like what all babysitters would look like if dads did all the hiring. Hiring for a porno. According to my friends her trip to the plastic surgeon had been a smashing success as well. I wanted to ask the wife if this babysitter was part of the reason for the move to Miami in the first place but could not think of any tactful way to do this and was not inebriated enough to just go for it.
To make things even better the babysitter brought over pot. Lots of it. Decent stuff. So by 11 am we were stoned and had a few shots of whiskey in a house with no furniture. Time to go somewhere. We drove over to the beach. In LA this involves driving through the canyons that separate the beach from the rest of the city. The canyon roads are way hillier than anything in Florida. They have turns, uphill and downhill sections and even some switchbacks. It was fun to be back driving in the hills. George and I took our rental car, Lisa the wife drove herself and the two kids and Dave drove himself because he had to stop somewhere afterwards and attend to a business requirement.
We hung out on the beach for a while and then Lisa and the kids went home. Dave took us to see an old surfing buddy. The surf buddy was the quintessential California surfer dude. Jeff Spicoli grown up. He owned a surf shack house just across the road from the beach so he could check the waves from his bed. He had just gotten his girlfriend pregnant and was in the process of turning his grow room into a nursery, the kid kind.
Needless to say he had some great weed. Dave smoked a bit with us and then had to run. George and I stayed behind and smoked more. A lot more. Enough that every time I counted my fingers I got a different number. I would have called it a success and stopped counting if I had once come up with 10 or 9 or 11. Do thumbs count towards the 10 fingers we are supposed to have? Didn't I smash that bong that last time it came around to me? No? Well I am going to smash it this time. Pass it over. Holy shit! How long has Jack Nicholson been standing there? Fuck fuck fuck he is playing a cop isn't he?
Eventually all things must come to an end and the sun set literally and metaphorically on a beautiful day. The type of sunset over the Pacific that you find on the postcards in LA that don't feature busty starlets saying wish you were here. George and I headed back in the dark to find the car. Luckily there were just 2 cars in the lot so it took us only 3 tries to get the right car. A Neon can look a lot like a Suburban in a dark parking lot.
I drove back. After a brief discussion where George insisted that I turn on the head lights and I tried to cover for the fact that I was so stoned that I forgot to turn them on by claiming that in our current state we should be going in stealth mode, we got back onto the canyon roads.
While we were at the beach getting stoned road crews had come in and totally changed the road, leaving no trace that they had been there other than the radically altered topography.
“You are ok,” I told myself. All you have to do is follow that minivan in front of you. The roads were like a roller coaster. Left swoops and right descending death spirals. I wasn't sure how were were staying on the road as the banking in the turns got more and more extreme. The minivan was holding the road though so we should be ok... unless it has suction cup tires that are designed especially for these roads... no that is impossible it would sound like an octopus arming if that were the case.
The road suddenly dropped away following the canyon. I put my foot on the brake pedal thinking that it had better be attached to a parachute if it had any hope of slowing us before we reached Hades. At the bottom was a hairpin switchback and this is where things got weird.
The banking of the hairpin just kept going rotating to the left. At 45 degrees, my heart was in my throat. At 90, I was wondering exactly how I was going to die. A rock or tree coming in through my window as we slipped of the road into the ravine? A Hollywood worthy explosion...
180 degrees and nothing. We were driving upside down on an upside down road!! A small part of my brain was saying that this was impossible but all my senses were letting me know it was true. Regardless I needed to concentrate. Don't do anything foolish and nothing bad will happen. Roll the window down a bit and listen for octopus noises from the minivan. Thank god there were no turns because I wouldn't have had the slightest clue how to correctly signal.
The roads flipped back and forth a few more times before we exited the canyon. None was quite as nerve wracking as that first time. As it happened I wanted to tell George but he can be a bit nervous at times and if he hadn't noticed it by himself, I figured I would totally freak him out if I told him what was happening. I didn't think I could handle both the car and George flipping out.
Florida is flat. The entire state is flat. The highest point in the entire state is Britton Hill, elevation 435 feet above sea level. The lowest highest point of all 50 states. South Florida is even flatter than the mountainous north of the state. This is one of the things that I dislike about down here.
Forget about how flat Florida is for a while. We will get back to it soon enough (edit: or not but eventually. i sort of promise)
My friend George and I got the chance to drive some boats across the country to San Diego for a race. “Got the chance” was a euphemism for “foolishly volunteered for what was a suicide mission.” The boats belonged to some people in the Bahamas. I still wonder how close I came to being on America's Most Wanted either as the villian or the victim. The van and trailer we were driving belonged to some guy who lived in Georgia. The van belonged to a nice enough sounding guy who was an aerospace engineer. In my mind I pictured a very meticulous gentleman in a white lab coat. The reality of it was he was one of the get your hands dirty type who wouldn't think much of climbing out on the wing of of an airplane in flight to do a little bit of maintenance on the engine. The van was sold shortly after George and I returned it. I am pretty sure that some one bought it, did a lot of work fixing it up nicely and then wrote “Free Candy” on the side of it and its picture is now making the internet rounds.
The van had a multitude of issues that might scare the hell out of a normal person but were perfectly normal for someone who thought nothing of on the fly aircraft repair. The steering wheel acted more as a suggestion box than as a control. The engine “ate” oil. A lot of it. It was a mystery. It never leaked oil and there was never any telltale smoke in the exhaust of oil being burned. I concentrated more on the steering problems. “HOLY SHIT WE ARE BURNING OIL” was never as crucial as “HOLY SHIT WE ARE GOING TO HIT THAT SEMI”
I think it was some sort of insurance scam as the boat owners seemed genuinely shocked and dismayed when George and I showed up with everything intact in San Diego and then doubly so when we made it all the way back to meet the cargo ship to take the boats back to the Bahamas. Our adventures in the van included the oil, the steering, corroded battery cables, leaking fuel pump, getting stuck a few miles up a desert road, and losing the all the lights on the back of the van and the trailer.
The trip to San Diego was 2,600 miles give or take a few detours, some planned, some whimsical, some just because the van didn't always take our steering suggestions. We rested a few days. Played in the surf and enjoyed the laid back beach vibe. George is a good surfer. I wallowed about trying not to get “saved” by the lifeguards or run over by the surfers who spent more time riding their boards than under them.
Once our hands relaxed from the white knuckled death grip they had become frozen in from the trip from Miami, we decided the only natural thing to do during the down time in a road trip was to... take another road trip. We figured that a rental car would make much more sense. Part of our itinerary was to Yosemite. Minus the need to tow a few thousand pounds worth of boats and trailer, not having to negotiate with the van over steering decisions while going around mountain roads seemed well worth the extra cost...
(I am getting to the part where Florida being flat comes into play.)
