As the final city before crossing onto Noto Peninsula, Kanazawa did get many broken pavement spots and light damage elsewhere during the New Year’s Day earthquake. There was a lot to see in 36 hours.
Samurai Residence Apartment next door
A wonderful former home of samurai, this incredibly well-preserved, sort of large house, is nestled amongst many other regular suburban homes, which did their best to blend into the samurai house architecture. We arrived on a Saturday morning, amid on and off snowstorms, and had the place mostly to ourselves.
Next, we went off to a gold leaf museum. Kanazawa is famous for making incredible gold foil, and they even use the bits that don’t make it onto a good sheet of foil as toppings on ice cream, yogurt, and anything else you can put in your mouth.
Gold Leaf Museum entrance Gold Leaves Please use umbrella bags…Clam shells
It was all ours plus two staff.
Next was a Geisha district of nice Edo-period structures. Then the Kanazawa Castle, with a capricious spring storm.
He saw you first!Castle grounds
Kanazawa is a large city, tons of taxi stands, restaurants (we had Korean last night) and a great vibe.
For our first inter-city trip we got reserved seats in a bullet train (Shinkansen) for the three hour ride. The culture on these trains is to purchase a cool bento box in the station and eat on the train. We got one decorative bento and one traditional.
Shinkansen lunch box! 🚄🇯🇵Regular bento boxDessert in front, inigiri, a sausage (?) and a piece each of shrimp and chicken.Onigiri, tamago, another sausage plus a meatball.
Tokyo Station is in full madness due to Sakura (cherry blossom season) hits now as well as spring vacations. We were lucky to get our full month of reserved seats purchases on day two at the JRail office in the station. The lines this morning were insane.
There are several levels and we found the food level
First AvenueSakura decorations all over Tokyo
Ready to go, we hit the track and took reclining, very clean and modern seats. It’s almost silent on board despite blasting down the track at 150mph.
These halls go on and on
They really have an amazing train system here; you’re even given a door number that matches a gate to enter closest to your seat, so no walking down cars.
New York to Tokyo is almost 15 hours airborne and I am 6’1” tall so…these wide-body 777 models allow for skewed or parallel seating which makes the ‘room’ seem more casual overall. You are in a pod which includes a desk, electronics controls and outlets, cubbyhole areas for storage of handy items and terrific lotions, blankets and pillows.
We didn’t bring much to eat on board since they do keep it coming every few hours plus we stopped in the United lounge pre-flight for breakfast at 7:30am for a 9:45 departure. I went with a mild-mannered steak & potatoes on board as my final Western meal for a month.
Luggage for the two of us the last decade are a backpack each plus a string bag for planes, trains and day outings. The pack is 30 liters and 18 lbs but includes my winter coat and a pair of sneakers. No checked bags since about 2012.
My kit above and Wendy’s is similar. Wendy made me the string bag the day before we left.
The route, 14 hours and 35 minutes, is almost never over water:
We head right over Montreal and turn left at the Arctic Circle……then fly across Alaska and down the Russian coastline to Japan ✈️
Our first stop after immigration is the JRail office in Haneda Airport to convert our ‘foreigners-only’ 21-Day passes into actual tickets and have the staff book our month of inter-city seats in advance. Then the hotel to drop bags and race to Suntory Hall, a gem among classical venues, for a double-barreled Beethoven; the Emperor piano concerto *and* the Ninth symphony! it’s a pick-up orchestra of locals and should be filled with enthusiasm.
March is our wedding anniversary and this year is our thirtieth. We are heading for the month to Japan to tour shrines, castles, eat the street foods of about eight cities and participate in several cultural classes.
Japan is quite large and we will focus on the central section.
Flying into Tokyo, we spend three days getting our bearings on the west side of the city with a Beethoven concert at Suntory Hall (a gem among classical halls) and jazz clubs plus lots of street foods like Dango (rice balls on skewers with different filling and/or sauces), Yakitori (skewered & grilled fish-meat-veg) and of course the ubiquitous vending machine culture.
We depart for Kanazawa, the final town before the peninsula where the recent quake occurred.
There was some damage but it looks fine to visit.
Many on the Noto Peninsula travel to Kanazawa weekly to bathe; water still not restored a/o Feb 14Tokyo west to Kanazawa.
We will be taking advantage of the express trains as often as possible and this one looks about three and a half hours. We cannot reserve seats til we arrive there but it is quite pleasant and civil. On these train rides are when people break open their vending machine bento boxes and more.
Among the approximately eight cities we plan on visiting we will indulge in several cooking classes, a knife-making class (two knives are shipped home) as well as a kintsugi class; the art of repairing while enhancing, often using gold.
Kintsugi
By then end of three weeks we will have made a counter-clockwise circle around the middle one third of the country, ending on the east side of Tokyo for the final four days.
I took my first motorcycle riding lessons at age 11, the summer of 1977. My brother and I were sent to a two-week sleep away camp in the next town and they offered, for an extra $20 per child, either horseback riding lessons or motorcycle riding lessons. The first summer was on the Honda 50cc on a closed course. The second summer we did an advanced course on a Honda Trail 70cc. About a month after that second session ended, I was given a Honda CM90 for my bar-mitzvah present and rode thru high school.
12 yo & psyched!
After that, I again owned a motorcycle early in our marriage on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that we used for a couple of runs and then I went without until the kids were out of the house. A few years before my retirement I picked it up again, and was able to average about 12,000 miles per year the first five or six years, mostly up and down the coast between home and visiting Florida.
It was now seven years after my retirement, we had relocated to Florida, and I continued riding around the state and venturing into the nearby states. I was on my way home alone from a overnighter in the Smoky Mountains with some experienced off-road riders. They had been giving me a soft introduction to riding in deep and loose gravel as we took the bikes off-road in Cherokee and Nantahala National Forests.
Me on L, late Tiger far R.
I was only 14 miles from home after about a 10 hour day, going through a green light at an intersection I had passed through many times in the four years since we moved here. It is a very busy intersection on the outskirts of town where commercial buildings start to disappear and give way to giant housing developments.
I have no memories of what happened but between reading the police report, speaking with the officer who rescued me, and other accounts, the 16 year old driving the car that hit me took a left turn on a blinking yellow left turn arrow but failed to yield, claims to not have seen my fluorescent yellow helmet or my glitter white motorcycle, and hit me without braking.
My Tiger’s mirror balanced on the hood…note the outline of my back and helmet on the windshield
Since I was going through a 4-way intersection with traffic lights, in the other 2 directions, stopped at the red lights, were plenty of cars on a Sunday in September at 6:15pm. The second car was a St Johns County Sheriffs Deputy returning from an investigation. He heard the ‘boom’ of the hit, saw me fly off the car’s windshield, and went to work.
By using his radio rather than a civilian cell phone dialing 911, the Deputy was able to immediately access the Fire/EMT Station about 1/3 mile away, behind the shopping plaza my crash occurred in front of. The Deputy determined I needed a pelvic brace and alerted the EMTs. As the EMTs approached he had already told the helicopter where to meet the ambulance.
I was in the air in under three minutes.
I landed at Orange Park Medical Center, chosen for their specialty Trauma Center. The helicopter crew reported to Wendy that I was awake and repeating my vital information over and over. They asked Wendy if I was a service veteran due to this ‘combat reaction’. I suppose it was shock and adrenaline of course.
An interesting note; when one arrives at the hospital unconscious and without a person to register you, the computer assigns you a random ‘John Doe’. Mine was Optra India.
There were many injuries and surgeries began on arrival with a splenectomy and many attempts at stabilization. I was sent into what became a 6 week propofol and fentanyl sleep. Without too many details, it took three days to close me. I had a dozen surgeries the first week. Screws were added, rods. An External Fixator, ex-fix, was screwed to my pelvis just above my abdomen. Of course I was intubated, asleep, food was pumped into my body and even into my nose. Six weeks.
A few days before Halloween, they began to wake me up using a technique referred to as ‘sedation vacation’. They gradually reduce the medicine and see how you react. I gave a few typical reactions including too much movement because I hadn’t yet understood my situation and then they put me back under. Another sedation vacation went fine and I made some funny comments, once as if I was the owner of a racecar team and I said something like ‘we’ve really got to get rid of our tire changers, they are completely the worst part of the team’. Another sedation vacation took place where I asked Wendy ‘where are the 17 Publix sheet cakes that I ordered?’ and ‘what are we gonna do with all these eggs’ thinking I was looking at a large diner-sized egg stack.
Finally, after a couple of days of this, I was out of it; that is, awake. My ‘wake-up’ dream was me and a group of about six SWAT-style spies dropping Tom Cruise-style into a dark space between the ceiling and the floor above, where my surgeon was giving instructions to us. It seemed she was smuggling meds from the hospital with this gang. I said to myself ’just stay calm and when we leave I’ll drift away’. My therapist said this is a common type of wake up dream; your brain knew you were in danger, knew that the surgeon was in charge and even that I was in a hospital.
When I was asked by Drs the typical questions in a situation like this I was able to identify myself, but gave my current age as 28. That was the age I was when I married Wendy. I knew there was an accident but I just guessed at that; I didn’t know what kind. I had no memory of the accident, had no idea what hospital I was in or how I got there.
Week seven was spent in a neighboring hospital for a specialist to have a go at my really damaged bladder (it was crushed by the pelvis break and it was filled with pieces of bone and had a hole near the thin neck area). The main hospital took some turns but really lobbied for the other Dr to do this.
I had Halloween there; the Operation game patient, of course:
Don’t remove the funny bone plz
Week eight and I was back in Orange Park to have a few items removed as they prepped me for a move to a rehab hospital; a full hospital but you do about six hours of PT and OT daily. That final week was also blurry as they took down the levels of fentanyl etc so I wasn’t on anything when I left about November 10.
A year later, looking back on the group of roughly 100 men and women who touched me over those first eight weeks, it was an amazing group of people, an entire orchestra-sized ensemble, the best of the best, who got handed an incredible mess and dug in deep to turn it all around.
The surgeons had incredible respect for the senior nurses’ opinions and thoughts. The nurses broke it down for Wendy and the rest of my family, and treated me, depending on their ages, as if I was their brother or their favorite uncle.
One young nurse, who was mostly on overnight detail, had a week vacation during my visit and would call Wendy daily to find out how I was. From her vacation. Every day. Other nurses would coach Wendy on how to approach certain matters with doctors to get the most desirable result.
Wendy reciprocated throughout my tenancy with endless supplies of cookies, which she would bake in our apartment between 11 PM and 1 AM. She would usually get home around 9:30 or 10 PM after staying with me till 730 or 8 PM. It was a good arrangement except how long Wendy was up and running every day.
I was taught to drink and eat again; I had lost 45 pounds during the sleep. I began rebuilding my atrophied body by doing wheelchair exercises; leg lifts and 1 pound hand weights. I still had a litany of medical issues, tubes, and surgeries to deal with, so I was often interrupted in PT to go get an x-ray or something. I still wasn’t allowed to try standing since we weren’t sure if the pelvis was healed yet.
One of my issues was my injured left hand. I asked to be included in the optional Music Therapy and Jaylyn W. and Danielle P. came through with a terrific exercise aimed at my dropping left ring-finger.
Trying chord progressions, wheelchair; music therapists are amazing. They treated me with dignity and compassion.
We moved through four weeks of muscle strengthening, coordination, daily activities, protein intake (I was given liquid protein to drink and double meal protein portions) and medical progress.
I wasn’t really ready to be sent home but Blue Cross had enough and out I went.
It is the 20th month since the accident and I am in physical therapy twice a week strengthening my atrophied legs and hips. The nerves in my legs, which re-grow at about 1 mm per month, are approaching the end of their regeneration. Things are returning to normal.
A friend from Tennessee invited me for a weekend of fire-roading in the Smokies, and as a new Ohlin ‘Adventure’ shock had just been added to the Tiger, off I went. The 800xc is dirt-able with Anakee 3 tires and the Ohlin, however, I have been reluctant to test the sugar-sand trails in Florida. The hard dirt and gravel of both Cherokee and Nantahala National Forest roads should be great. Plus, there were experienced locals leading; I could just relax and ride.
2012: Bonnie on the Dragon
It was over 500 miles to get to The Lodge At Tellico Plains and I split it up by one long day most of the way and the second day riding the Dragon and the Cherohala Skyway
before meeting at The Lodge. I’ve been to the Dragon three times prior and we might not be riding to the Dragon part of the Smokies if we are trail riding, so I figured stop in on the way and get a sticker and some North Carolina BBQ (pork with a layer of finely chopped cole slaw). It was cool as I rose in altitude into the Smokeys and sure enough I was riding through fog from 8 in the morning until about 10. I stopped at the Dragon for a snack and a few photographs, and there were only maybe 20 riders hanging out.
They hit 96°F yesterday in Georgia, and more is in store. Also, a storm is headed up from the Atlantic.
The Lodge At Tellico Plains is real nice, with optional indoor bike parking for $5 and modern cabins. After a terrific 200 miles, I checked in as the record heat rolled in.
We were on the road by 9 and heading up the mountain. A couple of miles into the Cherohala Skyway we took a right onto Cherokee National Forest road 210, a canopy shaded paved road that ran along a creek for quite some time. Eventually, we broke off onto some very slushy gravel with lots of elevation and hairpin turns. It was also a two-way road so we really couldn’t hug the cliff wall the way we wanted to because of oncoming traffic, and there were oncoming cars, motorcycles, and side by side ATVs. The experienced group with the proper bikes and training were blasting through this at about 50 miles an hour while I drifted around in the back in first and second gear.
I survived however, and we returned to the pavement, which they tore up as well, and I was always about a mile behind them. We stopped for several snacks around the mountains and had a spectacular day riding.
We were able to criss cross in and out of North Carolina and Tennessee including both the Nantahala and Cherokee Forests.
Over 250 people from around the world gathered together to bicycle 60 miles (97k) from Auschwitz-Birkenau to the JCC in Krakow. The Ride for the Living (RFTL) commemorates Poland’s Jewish past, celebrates its present and most importantly looks towards its bright future. The ride is celebrating six years of bicycling from the deplorable horrors of the past to the hope of a thriving and resilient future of Jewish life in Krakow, Poland, and the world.RFTL is a community event that includes participants who range in age from holocaust survivors to young children and riders of all abilities. The ride coincides with a week-long international Jewish cultural festival comprised of more than 70 countries, 30,000 participants and 300 events.
The oldest rider this year, Bernard Offen (90), is a survivor of five work camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau. Bernard shared his memories of the places where he stood for selections…
A crisp, clear January day was the impetus to explore the Old Brick Road. There is a ten-ish mile section of Old Dixie Highway that is a drop off the beaten path, bordered by a scrub forest in Flagler County, Florida.The original Dixie Highwayproject brought together private industry and state governments to create a network of roads which would connect ten states with more than 5,000 miles of paved road.The portion of the original Dixie Highway we visited was completed in 1916. It is a stretch of red-brick road that brought a stream of tourists from as far as Chicago to the tropics of Florida. By 1926 however, US Highway 1, a more efficient, paved multi-lane road, was completed and the Old Brick Road instantly became obsolete.Today, it is one of the few remaining original sections of highway and it attracts very few tourists. It is…
A weekend with no holiday party scheduled and a clear weather forecast was a perfect opportunity to take in the New York holiday energy.
Before the chaos and crowds we visited the School of Visual Art’s gallery on the 15th floor of the Starrett-Lehigh building in Chelsea. An exhibit of one of my favorite illustrators, Roz Chast, was on the must-see-before-it-closes list. It was a terrific exhibit.This year’s holiday window walk began at Macy’s. The theme is “Believe In The Wonder Of Giving.” The windows show Sunny the Snowpal, with the help of her friends and Santa, save Christmas.Lord & Taylor has sold its flagship building so this is the last year for its holiday windows (only two windows on Fifth). Their very first animated and a few Canada Geese to offer some holiday cheer.Heading further north, Patience and Fortitude, the two regal lions at…
Villa Britannia is a lovely bed and breakfast outside the Porta Messina in Taormina. The home is inviting and filled with aromas that draw you immediately to the kitchen. Host Louisa greets everyone with a brief history of the home, introduces her husband Marco and her father-in-law, who are also hands-on in the multi-course meal process, and explains the simple, pure and fresh ingredients of the Sicilian diet. We began by chopping vegetables for a caponata (a cold Sicilian roasted eggplant and vegetable salad), tomato sauce, and a second kind of eggplant salad. After we got the sautés going on the stove, we headed to the outside garden to make our pasta. Sicilian custom is to use durum wheat semolina and water. The durum wheat semolina is a product that is less refined compared to the re-milled semolina; yellow color, a little more coarse in texture. First roll and knead…
RFTL is a community event that includes participants who range in age from holocaust survivors to young children and riders of all abilities. The ride coincides with a week-long international 
Today, it is one of the few remaining original sections of highway and it attracts very few tourists. It is…
This year’s holiday window walk began at Macy’s. 
Lord & Taylor has sold 
Heading further north, Patience and Fortitude, the two regal lions at…
Half-tank Adventures! 