January 1st, 2008
The best laid schemes
Today I’m starting out on my four-day tour of Tohoku (northeast Japan). I’ve been planning it for days, and set got so many pieces of the puzzle put together in advance, but somehow still managed to first miss the train I hoped for by oversleeping, and then fail to estimate what time it really was and had to run to the station to make the next departure on time. In the process I made quick grab-and-run decisions that I may end up regretting in the next couple of days. The first of these is bringing the 5D, the second leaving behind my tripod. I also forgot the Holga and my positioner. I also declined to bring the Happy Hacking keyboard with me, which leaves me with only the working set of keys on the WinBook (this does not include escape, five, six, zero and consequently right parenthesis]. But all twenty-six letters of the alphabet work, and my current login password doesn’t contain any of the dead keys, so I’m fine as long as the five-year old Li-Ion battery holds up. At least I didn’t pull any boners like leave the power supply at home. I’ve done this with cameras before though.
To get back to the actual trip, I’m travelling to Tohoku, in particular Hiraizumi in Iwate prefecture, and fan favorite Kakunodate in Akita. One of the many challenges in this journey is time management, many in the realm of transportation. In Tokyo where the Yamanote line comes every two minutes, in the country trains come once an hour, and if one’s transfers don’t line up nicely with the sparse number of departures, a nice long fifty minutes or so is spent in the cold staring off of the station platform into rice fields. Today I have to transfer four times to get to my destination, and in the end I have a fifty-minute layover to travel one station. Maybe I’ll get a bus. Maybe I’ll decide to tough it out and walk. Who knows. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get a seat on the bullet train. Maybe not and I’ll be standing. That brings to mind one more thing I forgot to bring: a book. 
