Hokkaido - Day 1-2 - A real journey

We began our trip on Friday afternoon, about 1-2 p.m. We drove the whole way which in and of itself is quite a feat. We used Mark's car which used to belong to Jon Oxford, another guy in the band who recently left for his new assignment in Belgium. He gave the car to Mark for free as it is getting on in years and usage. I actually house sat for Jon awhile back while he was stateside and drove his car a bit so when my turn came to drive on the trip it was not a "blind drive" as it is so many times on trips like this. It's a nice solid 1992 Toyota and it performed like an absolute champ the whole way. I was almost surprised we didn't have at least some car trouble after 6 days of hard driving.

We knew it was going to be a lot of time in the car and fortunately Mark has a nice little iPod. A few days before we drove he told me to bring in any CDs I might want to share. They all got loaded and we jammed to the iPod most all day when behind the wheel. For a while we picked and choosed (picked and chose just sounds wrong), but then we just put it on random and had a blast with that. We have similar taste in music and quite a few other things as well so we hardly ever had to skip a song. A few fun facts that came from the time with the iPod.

Theme song from the trip: A Town with an Ocean View (From Kiki's Delivery Service)
Most listened to composer (probably): Yoko Kanno
Country's with the best* national anthems (aside from U.S. and Japan**): Azerbaijan (the non-soviet one), Monaco, New Zealand, and Israel.

* - My definition of best for this: anthem that fits the country and doesn't sound like just another hymn.
** - After hearing a bunch of anthems it is pretty clear that both the U.S. and Japanese anthems really do stand out as a cut above.

In spite of the wonderful music, overall the first day wasn't very exciting. Lots and lots of traffic through Tokyo, quite unsurprising, but after getting a bit North and fully on the expressway we made good time. We had planned to stop at Sendai for the night, but decided to push all the way to Morioka. It's hard to judge a town when all you do is come in, find a cheap hotel, and go to sleep, but I have nothing against Morioka.

Somewhere near Sendai was the beginning of another trend of our journey, especially the first part. A nice big bowl of Hokkaido-style ramen was our dinner. For those of you that only know the 20 cent version of ramen I apologize. Real ramen is still basically noodles, but there's other "stuff" in there as well. Hokkaido ramen is even better. They usually start it with a miso base (kind of a refried bean soup) instead of the meat/soy broth you often find and then add any or all of these things: sprouts, mushrooms, cabbage, seaweed, green onions, and meat. Put them all in a big bowl and serve it up HOT and you have a nourishing comfort food like none other. Ramen was the bulk of my diet until about day 5 of the trip.

Day 2 started pretty early because we had a boat to catch. We drove up to the tip of mainland Japan to the town of Aomori. We found the ferry pretty easily and were able to book some passage without too much difficulty. I probably could've stumbled through the Japanese myself, but Mark is quite a bit better with the language than I. We ended up having a bit of time so we went back into the town of Aomori for a bit. We had another bowl of ramen for lunch and then Mark wanted to hit an internet cafe before we left. We found an impressive cafe, but the registration process took more than 30 minutes. At least that's when we left, we had a boat to catch (shoot, I already used that phrase earlier).

This is the first time that I've ever been on a boat that is actually going TO someplace for more than a day. Every other time I can remember it was just out on the lake for a few hours, or just across the water for some time at an island, but this was an ocean voyage. We're crashing along, going miles out to sea, rocking in the waves. Really nothing quite like it. We made port in Hokkaido at Hakodate at about 5:00 or so. From there we drove along the southern shore until we found a great little Ramen joint. It was a bit cold too so we had the food as it was meant to be experienced. We hit the road again and made it to Muroran at 9 or 10 o'clock. Again, I don't have much of a basis for judgment, but I will say that the feeling I got from my time in Muroran is that it is a much crummier town than Morioka. Sorry guys. But in the end, a bed is a bed.

Overall travel time - About 17 in the car and 4 on the boat.
Total Mileage ~ 700 miles