Starting again in a new place

Howdy.

Sorry for the long hiatus. Life had taken precedence over blogging for the last months.

I am all well and good. I may have mentioned it here before, but I have finally made the move back to my native country of Japan. We have found a place to live in the city of Fujisawa which is about an hour South East of Tokyo by train. It is just West of Kamakura which is the city that used to be the seat of the Shogunate long ago. They call this area Shonan and is quite a popular area for its beaches. We are quite happy to finally be living together and in our own place. (We were living in a family related place before.)



I had actually a couple more Portland posts in mind before I left, but then the move was so consuming, I had no time nor energy to write them. This move was probably the worst move of my life as I barely got out of the place in time to catch the plane. My friend Eric who came to give me a ride to the airport saw that my apartment was still a big mess when he arrived and if he hadn't been so kind to help me pack and clean, I wouldn't have made it. I was quite deluded about how much work was involved and how much stuff I could take with me. I had been hoping to be able to take the remnants of my bike (the bike sans the damaged frame), but there was no way for me to take the wheels as they were too big and I already had so much luggage.



I did manage to take the KT (Kao's bike) with me as you can see in this photo. It is doing well. I've made a few modifications to it to suit the environment here. I will do a post about that soon.

This area is really beautiful with the the beaches, but there are also many rivers and rice fields and lots of green. I thought I would be missing Portland a lot, but this place is so much better than my expectations that I haven't even thought about Portland that much. Our place is only a 15 minute bike ride from the ocean and 30 minutes to either Kamakura or Chigasaki. Chigasaki is a very bicycle friendly city and it is where the pro cyclist Fumiyuki Beppu (he rides for Lance Armstrong's Team Radioshack) is from.



We have been taking little bike trips all over the area and it's too much to write about it all, but I will now resume with regular updates, and I will write more detailed entries from now on.

We currently have 3 bikes among the two of us. One is Kao's KT, one is Kao's mamachari and the thrid one is my Dahon folding bike. We have been sharing KT and the mamachari between us for now, but I have been looking to build a new bike with the parts from the old one. It's taken a bit of time to consider many different possibilities and I've finally decided on something, but I never would have guessed my new bike will be that. It's still going to take a while to put it together, but I will write about that soon as well. I don't know if we might have lost what few readers we had during our inactivity, but if you are still with us, thank you. I think this blog will be much more interesting reading as we are starting a new life in a very beautiful new place.