Tokyo Motorcycle Show 2012

It is a tale of endless longing, soul-crushing sadness, nail-biting tension, joy, frustration, and thousands of dollars. It is the story of Blake's motorcycle.

As many of you know, Blake and I worked long and hard getting his bike on the road. Then, once he was able to ride it, I was not able to be on it with him. If you want to carry a passenger on the back of your bike here, you have to take the Experienced Riders Course with a passenger on the back of your bike. So, not only is the rider on the bike for six hours, but the passenger is too. And let me tell you, this passenger's ass hurt like crazy after six hours on the seat.

The class is run by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation for personnel with SOFA status (it's a military thing for those living overseas). It's really informative and the teachers are amazing. They have really good tips and stories. The thing about bike people is that they are their hobby's greatest advocates, as well as greatest cautionary tales. It's a twofer every time you talk to a biker.

Unfortunately, at the Tokyo Motorcycle Show, we couldn't talk to many bikers because we don't speak the same language. That isn't the only different thing, though.

At Daytona, the fashion is very in your face. Beards in your face. Leather in your face. Over-tanned women in teeny, tiny clothing in your face.

At TMS, everyone looked very mainstream. All the off-center people were across the hall at the Anime convention. Note: that is not a joke, there was seriously an Anime convention in the other wing and we saw several interesting things that day.

I'm going straight to my favorite bike of the day:

Triumph's Steve McQueen Special Edition. They are only making 1,100 of them, and while I don't think I'd be on board with Blake buying one, it sure is pretty. Steve McQueen loved bikes and cars, and rode a Triumph in The Great Escape, an amazing movie that I cannot watch ever again because it has one of the saddest movie endings ever.

This bike can also be a generator. Very handy for outdoor rec. You can plug in a cook stove or a radio, or something that would make any camping adventure better, a laptop.

Of course it wouldn't be Japan if there weren't some interesting stuff around too.

It was a very cool day. We walked around and saw everything twice. By the end of the day, I'd had my fill of motorcycles. Blake, however, can never get enough.

Tokyo Motor Show

No one on the Tokyo Motor Show trip was very chipper that morning. It was rainy, with dense cloud cover- and maybe, like us, everyone on the bus was nursing pretty bad hangovers. Bad moods made worse by the "hour or hour and a half" drive taking close to three hours.

As Blake said on the MWR bus, the morning was not very good for his Morale or Welfare. It was a very good thing that once we arrived, there were many, many shiny things to distract us all.

To no one's surprise, there wasn't an American manufacturer in sight. Lots of Japanese (obviously) and European. We saw exactly one pickup truck, not many true SUVs and lots of cars that looked like this:

Lest you believe the entire event was like a real car show in miniature, there were some truly amazing, and expensive, cars there. Like a Lexus LFA, base price of $375,000, which is a steal considering that there will only be 500 and they are hand made, one car a day.

I also got to see a W12 engine, which is kind of two V6 engines stuck together. It's massive.

To me, though, the prototypes are where it's at. These things are sometimes very cool, sometimes very weird, but always interesting. Here are a few of our favorites.

Honda

Suzuki

Nissan Esflow

That last one really caught Blake's eye. A sporty-looking electric vehicle.

The prototypes were put on platforms or stages and there were huge crowds around every single one. I blended right in, caught up in the flow of pushing and elbowing. Blake, however, had the real advantage, being taller than almost everyone there. He was truly a man among boys that day.

Though it may sound like an oxymoron, the shoving and elbowing is good-natured. Hopefully I'll recover by spring, when the motorcycle show rolls into town.

For My Mother(s)

Long-promised pictures. I am shame-faced. For weeks I have forgotten to post these. Sorry mom, and mom-in-law.

This is the coat I received from the HSL-51 spouses' club. A week after we got here coincided with the once-a-year party they have to officially welcome everyone new. So, even women who had been here a year or more hadn't attended because if you can't make it, you have to wait another year. It was a lot of fun and after our little ceremony and party, the guys (in some cases gals) got to join us at the CO's house for a barbecue.  Note: this picture was taken in the lodge. SO glad to be out of that room.

Now on to the next: bikes!

These are our bikes. They allow us to get to the train station or grocery store in under five minutes. Also, handy baskets and sweet luggage racks. These were taken at our house (more pics to come of that). The big yellow square is our mailbox. It says "Post" on the front. The homeowner planted some johnny jump ups in front. The little box to the upper right of the mailbox is the doorbell. It's got a camera in it, which is awesome. Of course, the box inside looks like this:

In case you can't make that out, it's written in Japanese... which means I can't make it out either (ha!).  The button on the bottom is obviously the button you use to answer the door bell and see who wants to pay you a visit. The other buttons were mysterious orbs of mystery.

When Blake and I moved into the house, we knew things would be different. Even the way you hang curtains is different and don't even get me started on the toilet that I'm sure will become self-aware any day now. It didn't occur to us that there were things we wouldn't be able to figure out with a little intuition and a little trial-and-error.

So, we rounded up the instruction manuals for the door thing, the AC units (3), the dishwasher, the stove, and the water heater control panel/tub control that's in the shower room and sat down with a woman at our landlord company for half an hour while she tried to explain what the heck everything did. Some translations were easy: "this button is on/off," and some were not: "this button makes the AC good for your skin." What? Turns out the AC/heater downstairs is very fancy, and it has the four-billion buttons to prove it. It will regulate your AC, heat, humidity, has a setting for sleep, energy saving settings, a setting to keep the AC from drying out your skin, and it has a digital display in front that shows you the inside and outside air temperatures. Oh. And it talks to you in Japanese. The bathtub talks in Japanese too, so if you set the tub to auto-fill itself, it will give you an alert when it's almost ready, and will let you know when the tub's full.

It's a pretty sharp learning curve around here. It's the house of the future.