24 Hours in Tokyo/Heaven

Rosanna, Sarah and Jacquie eating at the most excellent Japanese Restaurant!

The bedroom, but the beds are in the closet for the day!
Kung-Fu-Fighting!
Wax on, wax off!

Welcome back from deployment David! Our friend and next door neighbor, Sarah's husband returned from the Middle East a few weeks ago. He was deployed for 4 months and Sarah was really looking forward to having him come home. They have 3 boys, Mitchell 7, Wyatt 3, and Baby David is 9 months. David surprised Sarah and booked one of the two Japanese rooms at the New Sanno Hotel in Tokyo, a Naval Armed Forces Recreational Facility. He booked it for one night and told Sarah to invite some friends and relax for 24 hours.

Room with a view!

This last Thursday afternoon, Sarah and I ventured out in "The Thing" AKA, "The Mystery Mobil", her van and drove into Tokyo. Thelma and Louise do Tokyo! We managed to get there with just a few glitches with the navagating. Sarah did a great job driving it was just her wingman that had the issues (me)!
Yum, sushi, shrimp, egg and salmon!


Our waitress in full kimono, remember it takes 45 minutes to put on and you can't do it by yourself. They put bibs on everyone.

Our most excellent chef!

Our entire neighborhood just happened to be staying at the New Sanno as well, just kidding, but our friend Rosanna was there with her family. The 3 of us went to dinner at the Japanese Restaurant at the hotel. It was so.... good, wonderful service too. The ambinace was magnifcant. We had almost 7 courses, starting with Sushi and ending with the main course of Tepanyaki, grilled swordfish and steak. I couldn't even fathom having dessert. We had a few crazy mixed drinks too. We had great plans to go in the jacuzzi, play cards and read our books.

Too cheap to go in or is it too wise, hmm!
Our new car!

We decided to walk to the Ice Bar. We wanted to do things we could not do with our children. The ice bar is made entirely of ice, the bar, walls, ceiling and floor, all ice. We walked for about 20 minutes to get there. There were so many nice stores and restaurants and Tokyo is so... safe. Once we got to the bar I said to Rosanna and Sarah that there was probably a cover charge and laughed and said it was probaly $ 35 just to get in. Well I nailed that price on the head. For $35.00 we got to borrow a fur lined cape, gloves, glass and a drink. Drinks after that were $12.00. We were just going for one drink to experience the ice bar and then back to the hotel. After much discussion we thought it was too much for just one drink, but we got to peak in and see what it was like. There was no one in there, just the employees. On the way back there was a flower shop that had some beautiful flowers, but was closed, so we were pressing our face up to the window to look and you could actually smell all of the flowers. We smelled the flowers for a few minutes and thought we better move on, before we were arrested. Oh the little things in life like smelling fresh flowers, right?

Our bedroom set-up for the night, oh so... comfy!

We walked back to the hotel and were too tired to go to the jacuzzi, so we talked for a bit and just relaxed, Rosanna went back to her family and Sarah and I read our books. The mats that we slept on were so... incredibly comfortable that I slept through the entire night, with the excepiton of getting up once.

Good morning little Miss Sunshines!

The next morning I had the grandiose idea of working out, then we were going to do room service in our room and sit on the floor at the Japanese table, read, with a possible jacuzzi and walk around Tokyo. Well that didn't happen, we actually slept unitl 10:00, which shows you how relaxed we were. We ordered room service, read, packed and checked out. We went to a bakery and bought some delicious scones for our families that our friend Elizabeth recommended and took us to. There was also a New York Bagel Restaurant that had the softest bagels ever and a huge selection to boot.

A glimpse of Tokyo!

Reluctantly we got in the car and headed home. We were making really good time, but were talking so much that we missed our exit. Um, you don't do that in Japan, 20 miles later we didn't have any exit options whatsoever so we could not get off and turn around. Mile 30, alas an exit, but we are now in the mountians, with snow. Not only was our mistake time consuming, but we had to pay an additional 650 yen for tolls. We asked the toll man how to get back on and basically there wasn't an entrance to go back, we could only go down the single lane mountain road, fun!!!!

LOST, the sequel!

What the......................heck! No exit option! I did not choose the NO exit option!

We were both having anxiety at this point. We only had 10 minutes left on our journey, when we missed our exit. Sarah remarked how this area looked like the area she saw where they have snow monkeys and monkey crossing signs, but that place was 2 hours away from Yokota Air Base. As we were driving I said to Sarah, do you mean signs like that yellow one over there with the monkey on it. Sarah slowly said, YES! We then saw the signs for Mt. Takao and yes we had driven around the entire Kanto Plains area that day. Fortuantely, the city at the bottom of the mountain I was somewhat familiar with, because John and I were lost for over an hour in that city looking for the children's hospital a few months before. We found our way back home after much stress and anxiety of wondering if we would EVER see our families again! Our detour cost us an extra one hour and 15 minutes or so...hey, but I got to see Mt. Takao! It was very pretty.

Where are we????????????

We had a wonderful and relaxing experience and it was very impowering to be able to navigate our way to Tokyo and also navigate our way out of a total mess on our way home. It doesn't seem so frightening now to be lost out the East Gate!

Thanks to David for treating us to a relaxing and fun 24 hours, thanks to Sarah for inviting me, thanks to John for letting me go and watchings the kidlets and thanks to Sarah and Rosanna for some great laughs.

Some of you are probably thinking how sweet of John and he was, but not without a price! Yesterday he finally bought the big screen TV he has wanted for years and it cost a lot more than we discussed, so he was well taken care of.

I do have to say the big screen is quite nice, especially when playing with the Wii.