Happy New Year!

明けましておめでとうございます！

今年もよろしくお願いいたします。

Happy New Year everyone. Hope that everyone has enjoyed their Christmas and New Year's Holidays.

We just recently returned from our annual trip to Matsusaka for the New Years. The wife and I left by car to catch up with Anna Mae who left with her grandma to on 12/24. I took the last day of the year off (Friday, 12/28) and we left here at about 1030am. We finally arrived in Matsusaka at about 630pm. It was not a bad trip at all. Most people don't take any more days off than the National Holiday's alot them every year. I decided I would rather beat the crowds.

We arrived in Matsusaka and found Anna Mae playing with her cousins Taiki and Momo. With the three of them together there is complete chaos and some great fun. Although, as always personalities collide and fights occur between Momo and Anna. Of course, 30 seconds later they are the best of friends again.

On New Years day I ended up getting a sinus infection that felt like someone pressing a boot down on the left side of my face. This took me out of commission for about two days. My mistake is that I did not bring enough American headache medicine with me to Matsusaka. Japanese medicine is in a word, weak. The Japanese would like to endure the pain or "Gaman" in Japanese. Americans and myself prefer not to endure this pain.

Finally, my brother-in-law's dad brought some good stuff from the hospital that he runs in Matsusaka. This seemed to fix me up right away.

On Friday 1/4 we left Matsusaka to get back to Inzai. I had thought that since we were leaving earlier than the last day of the New Years Holiday that we would not hit any big traffic jams. I was wrong. We hit 4 on our way back to Inzai. With the last being the longest, a behemoth of 25 kilometers (16 miles) just before arriving in Yokohama.

For this trip, we decided to take the 8 kilometer (5 mile) longTokyo Bay Aqualine tunnel that goes beneath the bay between Kawasaki and Chiba Prefecture. This was definitely the way to go. After the traffic jam in Yokohama we did not see another big jam up the rest of the way home. With the Aqualine, we avoided having to take the Shutoko through downtown Tokyo. We also got to eat at the end of the tunnel above the ocean at the Umi Hotaru (The Firefly of the Sea). This is a rest stop located at the end of the tunnel at the point where a very long bridge connects the tunnel to Chiba Prefecture. This was pretty cool.

The picture here is a piece of one of the massive drill bits used to cut the tunnel. You can see how clever I am by creating the illusion that I am actually holding the drill bit in my hand.