This morning, just as I said we would, Melba and I took a base taxi from our apartment tower to the Yokosuka-Chuo train station. We planned to spend the weekend with Ronda and Rene Saenz and their kids at Yokota Air Force Base, only forty miles from Yokosuka. They would be happy to show us some of the sights in their neck-of-the-woods. They have been in Japan for over a year now y ya saben como corre el agua. Getting there would be a two-hour train ride requiring us to switch train lines twice. Confidently, we set off. After struggling a couple of minutes with the ticket machine we secured our train passes, boarded, and twenty-five minutes later we pulled into our first stop at Yokohama Station. That is when the trouble began. The thing about trouble in its Japanese manifestation is that it sneaks up on you like a ninja. I never saw it coming. It began with the names of train stops.
You try and keep names like this straight in your head; Higashi Fussa, Keikyu, Hachiko, Hachioji, Jimmuji, Kanazawa, and a long string of others. I tried and my 'from-the-sticks' brain failed me. I had written instructions spelling out in detail how to get from point A to point B. According to the schedule, the next train change would occur about fifty-three minutes after the Yokohama stop, but the station name wasn't to be found on any of the stops that the train was making. My mistake was boarding a train network in a foreign country without a rail map. After an hour on this line we pulled into Tokyo Station and I became increasingly suspicious that we weren't headed in right direction. Five stops later we stepped off the train at Akabane Station, absolutely lost.It would have helped if I could speak a smidgen of Japanese, but I can only say hello, and hello doesn't do anyone much good when one is lost in transition. Thank God for the cell phone. We called Ronda and Rene who by now were already at Fussa Station near Yokota Air Force Base waiting for us.
"Hello, Rene? Help! We're lost!"
Studying his rail map, of which I was stupidly minus of at my location, Rene informed me that Akabane Station was for one, nowhere between our respective points A and B, and two, it was north of central Tokyo. A blind and deaf man could not have been more lost than we were.Using his map, Rene expertly plotted a course to the Fussa Station where they were waiting. We boarded the train again, and then finally, what should have been a train ride of a little over two hours from its inception, I had managed to stretch to just over three.
What weighs heavily on me now is that we have to get back the same way we got here, only in reverse. I wish I had put the Our Lady of Loreto medallion that Janie Lopez had given me on the eve of our departure to Japan in my pocket today. I could have used some guidance from above.Cost of this adventure? ¥3200 (3200 yen), about $28.
