Saturday Nov. 11 - First Day Of Rain Riding

All night there was thunder, and it is still pissing down as I go out in search for breakfast. On the good side there’s the newspaper’s report on how the US congressional elections turned out. The Republicans got spanked so hard that even Bush may have realized what just happened. Wonder if Blair and Danish prime minister Fogh regret having Bush’s dick in their mouth all these years? (pardon my French….).

Stay in town or not, that’s the question. The ‘Time Tunnel’ motorcycle event at Fuji Racetrack starts at nine tomorrow morning, a few hundred kilometers away, so I better get up there today. But first the nice girls at Tourist Information (“Are you here to play in the piano competition?”) direct me to the Yamaha museum, where I may or may not have an appointment with one of their PR people. The latter does not happen, and the cake in the cafeteria may really be the best thing out there. Ok, this sounds a bit unfair, because the cake WAS exceptionally good, and the collection of old Yamahas wasn’t half bad either. It’s just that I have seen so much good stuff lately. Only a few of the racers, and an 89 cc two cylinder street bike make me do a double take.

Hwy. 1 in rain and approaching darkness is out of the question, so I buy myself 2,800 yen of smooth asphalt and no traffic lights all the way to Gonteba, close to the track. The ride is fine, and in any case I would have felt silly to have taken the rain gear with me all the way from Denmark, only to use it for insulating the laptop back on the top box. It gets darker and darker, and finally all black, and slowly I get this unreal feeling, that pilots doing instrument flying probably also get up there; the sensation of speed and other physical inputs diminish, and in the end you must rely solely on what your eyes tell you.

It is impossible to find a bed in Gonteba, which could be expected on a Saturday night here around Mt. Fuji. Just before I pitch my tent at the first available piece of grass, one of the hotel clerks suggest I drive a bit further up the road to an onsen, where I also can stay for the night. It takes an hour to find the place, but it looks really great, it has a decent restaurant, and sleeping there won’t cost me much either. So here I sit typing, with a large beer in front of me, and a 42 degree hot bath somewhere in the near future. Kampai! (Cheers!)