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Day 2: Yokohama to Kyoto
After a great send-off by Sotheby’s this morning at the Marine Tower in Yokohama, we hit the road about 10:15 and traveled 450km to Kyoto.
During the first third of our six-hour drive, Mount Fuji was the star. Here’s a picture of the 1928 Plymouth being driven by John and Luke with the mountain in the background:
View of Mount Fuji from the road (Eileen Bjorkman photo)
Mount Fuji reminds me of Mount Rainier in my home state of Washington — both mountains seem to hold court over the surrounding countryside.
Around 12:30 we stopped for lunch and more views of Mount Fuji and John refueled the Plymouth — it can only travel unrefueled about 150 miles. That’s fine with me — I can’t stand being in a car for more than about two hours for a single stretch anyway.
In Kyoto this evening our guide, Hiro, suggested we have Japanese “pizza” for dinner. We followed him down an alley to a restaurant where the quality of the food far outstripped the size of the restaurant. Here’s what that delicious meal looked like:
Trying out “Japanese Pizza” (Eileen Bjorkman photo)
Tomorrow morning we rest for a bit and then have a very short drive to Kobe.
Day 1: Customs at Yokohama
We arrived yesterday in Tokyo and had drivers bring us to the Breezbay Hotel in Yokohama. After a nice tour of Yokohama this morning and then lunch in Chinatown, the next step was to retrieve the cars from Customs.
But there was a small snag. The cars themselves were able to clear customs with no problems, but some items that Leo and John had shipped in the cars (such as a case of bottled water) hadn’t been declared, and the customs process came to a screeching halt.
At 3:30 on a Friday afternoon, we were beginning to worry that our cars would be stuck in customs through the weekend. Even worse, Hollis, the auto import/export in Japan helping us facilitate the customs release had both Leo’s and John’s passports, and he seemed to have vanished.
Although we concluded that Yokohama wouldn’t be a bad place to be stuck for the weekend, we really wanted to get moving out on our trip, especially since we didn’t want to miss the ferry to Vladivostok — it only runs once a week.
At ten minutes to four, Hollis arrived, and after a few more phone calls and a trip to the warehouse at Yamashita Pier, we had both cars in hand. We made it back to the hotel at 5:20, just in time to meet friends for a wonderful dinner of sushi (not like anything you would get in the US). Here’s a picture of the cars right before we departed the warehouse:
The customs warehouse in Yokohama (Eileen Bjorkman photo)
Saturday we have a press conference in the morning and then we drive to Kyoto.
