A bunch of us went golfing up at Atsugi again. I faired a lot better this time. The weather was much nicer, and I actually got a decent sunburn on my arms and forehead. I wasn't expecting that, considering the weather had been so dismal for so long. The golf went well, especially considering it was my first full round of 18 holes. Ever. I wisely invested in a glove and a package of 18 golf balls at the Exchange ahead of time. Managed to only lose two golf balls, and that was on hole 17. Played with a couple of my best Korean buddies, LCDR "Big" Lee and LCDR "Sandman" Kim. These guys are great golfers. They claim they don't practice, but I happened to run into them at the Yokosuka driving range one of the two times I went there to practice. I gave Kim his call sign after our round of golf. He must have come close to par for the whole round, but his drives always seemed to find the bunkers around the green. He's a P-3 pilot, and those guys are notorious for not having callsigns, so I figured he deserved one. Hasn't really stuck very well, though.
We actually managed to have a couple of three day weekends, in a row no less. The first was to make up for a long couple weeks where we worked straight through a weekend, and several 12 to 16 hour days. The second must have been Memorial Day weekend. Another one of the CNFK guys, Dave, and I headed up to Tokyo. We hoped to go check out the Royal Palace (it has a unique name that I don't recall). Being a Monday, it wasn't open. But the moat around the whole place was pretty impressive. That's where we saw the swan.
Dave a Lonely Planet guidebook to Japan, and we tried to find the Sony Building to check out the new products displays. Unfortunately we walked around aimlessly for well over an hour and never found it. By that time I was pretty beat, so we just found a pub and had a couple beers. Then back to Yoko on the train. It's about an hour trip on the express train.
The next day off wasn't until the day of the final brief to the Admiral. Since I was in charge of putting the brief together, when we were done I was feeling pretty good. Once again, Dave and I set off on the train, this time for Kamakura. I'd been there once before, when I first visited Japan in 1996 on the USS Shiloh. We had a late lunch right by the train station, then went to go check out this famous sword maker's shop. Dave bought a knife, and we got to see them making a samurai sword in the back.
After this we tried to see as many temples as possible before they started closing. The first one was definitely familiar. We kept walking, going to a couple others. We tried to get to one more pretty far away, but it was closed by the time got there.
On the way back we saw a bunch of Koi fish (I'm told they're like Carp) in a river along the road. Not sure if you can tell from the photos, but these are huge fish! The one orange one was cool, and much more photogenic. Dave started feeding them trail mix and they were almost jumping out of the water. I guess the fish don't taste very good, that's why they grow so big and no one fishes them out.
Let's see, what else? I guess I'll throw some pictures of the barge (APL-40) and the cruiser (USS Cowpens) in drydock. The barge is where we've been working these last 10 weeks. I guess it used to be a ship way back during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. It was sitting around in a shipyard somewhere when Pacific Fleet decided they needed a berthing barge in Yokosuka. So here it is.
Cowpens is the same class of ship as Shiloh, my first ship. Incredible how small it looks in this big drydock, up on blocks!
I'm actually on leave at the moment, getting caught up on my studies and personal stuff. I go back in next week to wrap things up here, then back to Korea next week. Making travel plans for Katie to come out last week of July. Tickets are expensive, no surprise with the price of gas I suppose. We might meet in Alaska instead. We'd get an extra day together that way, and we'd both be a little jet-lagged instead of just Katie flying half-way around the world.
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