Well we got back from Sapporo on Thursday night with just enough time to wash clothes and repack for our weekend trip to Fukuoka.  Fukuoka is 251 kilometers (156 miles) south of Iwakuni on the island of Kyushu.  We took the expressway and stopped at a rest stop along the way.  This was not like any rest stop by the freeway I’ve ever seen.  The women’s restroom looked like it was lifted right out of a very fancy spa, complete with fresh flowers and toasty warm heated seats.

And check this out.  Just in case you can’t find your way around in there. . .

Another cool thing about this trip on the expressway is that we went through 35 tunnels.  I counted them all on the way back.  They ranged in length from 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) to 210 meters (1/8th of a mile).

We had two reasons for this trip.  First, one of the guys Chris works with is in a Latin band and he had a big show there Saturday night.  Nelson, who plays percussion in this band, is an interesting guy.  He grew up in Puerto Rico, lived in the US for awhile, he’s married to a Japanese woman and his father is Italian so he’s fluent in four languages – Spanish, English, Japanese and Italian.  Anyway, the twenty piece Japanese band was great.  They played a Latin Jazz style of music with lots of brass.  It was fun to watch the young Japanese salsa dancing.

Our second purpose for the trip was to go to Ikea.  Yep, even in Japan.

In an early post I mentioned that we want all of our friends and relations to come visit us so we now have a little van crammed full of your new guest room furniture.

We rented this little van and since the seats folded up along the sides there wasn’t room for the queen size mattress but Chris, the engineer, found a way to make it fit along with all the other boxes of furniture.

All in all a great new adventure traveling by car and navigating the Japanese signs and reading our Japanese maps.  Thank goodness for google maps on Chris’ phone.