The Grand Japan Road Trip: Part 1

Well like I said in last nights post, I got back from an awesome weekend going around various bits of Japan and doing a bit of sight seeing.  Now I'm going to recant the tale of this journey and you're going to either enjoy it, or get miffed that I'm not talking video games, but the games will return soon.

Anyway, on Saturday morning I climbed into a car with my girlfriend and her family and we set off.  What was strange about the start of this trip, is that despite knowing that it was going to happen for a good amount of time in advance, I didn't actually know where we were going, but it didn't matter, it was going to be awesome!

The first day itself was actually fair uneventful, as we spent the whole time driving.  On top of that, I had to wake up at 6am and was running on about an hour of sleep, so most of the first day for me was spent resting up.  At one point I did wake up and I saw this crazy monstrosity out of the car window.

This horribly scary looking thing is called Steel Dragon 2000 located inside a theme park known as Nagashima Spa Land.  Now I don't mind roller coasters, but I'm quite scared of heights.  If you are British and you're aware of the Pepsi Max Big One ride in Blackpool, it's basically like that but 100 feet higher.  Anyway, following this we got stuck in a traffic jam for an immensely long time.

It kind of worked in our favour though as you can see in the above picture, the rain was coming down hard, and the delay from the jam caused us to miss the rain entirely when we arrived at our destinations, so it all worked out in the end really.

So around 11pm we pulled into a service station, grabbed some food and got comfortable as we wouldn't be leaving until morning.  What was cool about this trip is that we didn't actually have a place to stay, the car was our makeshift home for a few days.  It sounds bad but the car was quite comfortable so it wasn't much of a problem. 

It's at this point I want to talk about toilets in Japan.  For me, Japan does both the best and worst toilets ever.  The best toilets are these cool looking things covered in buttons that have heated seats and little water jets so you don't have to use as much toilet paper when the deed is done.  The absolute WORST toilets are these things.

Now don't get me wrong, these things are functional at least, you can get the job done, but when I use the bathroom I like to relax, have a sit down and a think, reflect upon the day, but that just isn't possible with these things.  It's probably because I'm not used to using them but I'm always incredibly paranoid about missing or falling over into my own waste, as you have to kind of squat while using them.  My heart sinks a little bit every time I enter a bathroom that only has this style of toilet.

So after all that we grabbed some food and slept.  The traffic jam had set us back quite a bit and at this point we had been travelling for about 12 or 13 hours.  So we had some car snacks and hit the hay.

mmmm car beans

Well with that being the end of the first day, this will also be the end of part 1.  It gets a little more interesting from here but this post is already getting pretty long and people don't come here to read novels.  So tomorrow I'll be talking about some actual sightseeing.