Today’s post will be short and hopefully sweet as we spent the entire day in Walnut Creek at a - can you guess? - yes, camellia show. Sorry, no points for the camellia veterans. But I digress.
Today’s topic is a paean and a tribute to our Japanese tour guides: (in alphabetical order) Atsuko Takayama, Noriko Kuratani and Ryotaro Kunishige.
In each locale that we visited a local would act as our “informational” tour guide (for lack of a better term) for that day’s site visits. As knowledgeable and charming as some of these individuals were they got to go home when the bus returned to the hotel in the evening. Not so Atsuko, Noriko and Ryotaro.
Every morning when we went down for breakfast (sometimes as early as 6:30, never later than 7:30) there were Atsuko, Noriko and Ryotaro huddled together in the lobby or at a table working on the plan for the day. When Nancy would kick me out of our hotel room at 10 p.m. and tell me to take the computer to the lobby to work on the blog so she could sleep there would be Atsuko, Noriko and Ryotaro plotting and planning. All day as the bus rolled hither and yon there was the trio in the front of the bus making sure everyone was comfortable, informed about the plan and provided with a bottle of water.
They were responsible for our travel arrangements within Japan (which included making sure everyone was on the bus before we left), for our meals, for our lodging (especially challenging the day bad weather caused a cancellation of the jetfoil to Goto and the trio was forced to find last minute lodging for us in Nagasaki) and for our entry into the various gardens, shrines and temples we visited. They also tended the sick and the injured, put up with the complainers (of whom there were remarkably few) and gently herded the space cadets.
So please join me and raise your glasses to these stalwart individuals who worked so hard to make our visit to Japan comfortable, memorable and fun. Domo arigato (thank you). Sugoi (excellent)! Kampai (cheers)!
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