New Friends and Yokosuka Festivals

Beautiful beach near Uragwa

My sad sack bike.  It's a Miyata.  No glory with that name.

I feel like I have moved to Japan recently instead of SMS.  I am getting up insanely early.  Trust me, I wish I wasn't but I'll wake up between 5:15-6:15.  I will sort of know it's too early but then my brain says, "It's light outside!  Wake up!" and then my thoughts are off to the races.  Le sigh.  My life, so hard.

At the half-way point, smiling!

This morning, I was going to get up anyway because I decided to go road biking with a friend I had met at October's Run for the Cure.  [Where, for all my readers that don't know, I was the grand prize winner!]  Never mind that I don't really bike for exercise, I figured that I could hang well enough and fortunately, that proved to be the case.  The route had only a few challenging hills and even those were puny compared to some of the hills around here so I feel like the route was just about my speed (ha, ha, see what I did there?).  We went to Nobi and back for a trip of about 20 miles.  I came home to a message from SMS saying he was out shopping, an empty house and the saddest sight I've seen in a good long while…

Nothing sadder than an "Egg in a Hole" without an Egg :(

SMS came back with eggs and made his breakfast.  Then we picked up around the house until it was time to meet his friends for lunch.  We went to the Kalbi House, where they had really good-value lunch sets.  It was so nice to meet some of SMS' friends from his recent AOB class.  We had a great lunch and walked over to Umikaze Park.  There, the kids had an awesome time on the plastic sled slide-hill and the rock climbing wall.  SMS practiced his "kids setting" on his SLR and he was pretty happy with the results.  We headed over to Homes to scout out ideas for our balcony garden.  After Homes, I was pretty tired but SMS wanted to check out the Yokosuka Blue Street Festival.  We walked to Blue Street and it was a really nice, mellow walk.

 Blue Street was closed and while we had missed most of the performances, we had an early dinner grazing feast at various food stands, also known as food-on-a-stick. We had a chicken stick, pineapple stick, chocolate banana slices stick, cucumber with miso stick and, my favorite, a spiral cut potato stick battered and fried that was the most perfect balance of fresh potato chip and french fry.  I've never seen anything like it and it was so delicious!

Delicious swirl potato on a stick!

We finished up at Cafe Mercado, a pour-over coffee place in More's City.  The caffeine didn't completely help me so I took a quick 10-minute power nap before heading to the commissary.  We didn't have the best plan so our take-home groceries were a pretty random assortment, but it should all come together once we buy our produce out in town.