In my last post I talked about the incoming TV delivery, and luckily it arrived safely and the set up was pretty smooth.
It was my first time to get a delivery from Costco, and I wasn’t sure exactly what the delivery guys would do and not do to help out with the TV. As it turned out, they did as little as they legally could.
At Costco they warned me that I would have to take care of the TV settings and that was fine with me – I have the technical chops to handle it. When the delivery guys showed up they moved the box just inside our front door, and then promptly turned around ready to hit the road. I convinced them to move the box two more meters into our living room, and after that they were out the door and driving off. These guys were paid to move heavy thing “A” to point “B” and were not concerned about anything else. I understand that – shipping was free so who am I to complain?
I managed to wrestle the TV out of the box and then to move it up onto our TV stand without too much trouble. Setting up the TV was a breeze, and I can’t believe that some people pay a technician to do it. Kuniko and I agree that the size is just about perfect for our room and we’re happy with how it looks. We’ve been watching movies and videos more often lately to take advantage of the “Wow!” factor while it lasts.
Last weekend we decided to take a day-long road trip and enjoy the cooler weather and sunny skies. A while back we had driven to Okayama to see Kuniko’s sister, and along the way we were impressed with some of the scenery along the Seto Inland Sea. It is not far from us, but we hadn’t really explored it much, so this past weekend we did a more thorough expedition to learn more about it.
The trip was great. We started early in the morning and drove all the way to Hiroshima, sipping coffee in the car as the sun rose and taking country roads to avoid the high costs of the expressway. Once we got near Hiroshima, we turned south and took the Shimanamikaido – the expressway built to span many small islands on the way to the bigger island of Shikoku. We crossed bridge after bridge as we moved through the islands, and we stopped at almost every island to do some sightseeing. The views of the ocean and islands were great, especially from atop 360 degree viewpoints like the Kirosantenbo Observation Park.
Kuniko did all the driving on the trip. She loves to drive, and I was happy to let her do it. It was nice to roll down the windows and let the cool air in, and just take it easy and enjoy the scenery. We didn’t really have a time schedule for the journey and that made all the difference. Kuniko had done a lot of research beforehand and between that and the GPS it was a well-organized trip.
You probably would not be surprised to hear that we ate a lot, too. There was salted vanilla soft cream, lemon gelato, frozen oranges wrapped in mochi, a buffet-style seafood barbecue, a monster ham and egg donburi (with a side of gyoza) and two bowls of udon noodles from a roadside udon restaurant in Kagawa. We feasted and then we had plenty of time in the car between meals to digest and get ready for the next one.
Our final stop was at a couple of temples in Shikoku that are part of the 88 temple pilgrimage that has taken by Japanese for the past 1100 years. Our stop was just to get a taste of what it was like to visit these temples. From my limited experience visiting temples in Japan these ones seemed unremarkable, the only difference that I could see was that they were selling “pilgrimage goods”. The goods were walking sticks, clothing and books for people to collect inscriptions from the monks at each of the 88 temples of their journey.
As we were leaving we passed an older man wearing the white robes and hat of the pilgrimage, and he looked like he was in good shape. I wonder if he was traveling the pilgrimage on foot or by car.
From there we drove on home, with Kuniko hitting the expressway in order to trade our money for time and we arrived at home around 7 pm. We were a little tired out, but it was a great Saturday for us. I think we’ll continue to explore a little more around our area in the future, especially with autumn coming.
