Driving to Fukuoka

Last Thursday, I rode with Mel to Fukuoka to pick up her husband's replacement from the airport. I went along 1) because it was a good excuse to leave the house for an evening and 2) because Mel was nervous about making the trip. She had good reason to be: apparently everyone gets lost on the way to or from the airport. In fact, the last time she made the trip (to pick up her mom), she not only got lost on the way home, she knew she was going the wrong way and couldn't seem to get herself going the right way. So I figured getting some experience with the trip would be a good move, too. And playing navigator would help.
There are about five ways to get to the airport from here. 1) take the Navy bus. It leaves exactly twice a day. The first one gets you to the airport too late to catch most of the morning flights out of here. The second time is mostly used for the return trip, which gets you back to Sasebo in the wee hours of the morning. Not convienent, but free, so worth using if you don't mind waiting. Any poor folks who have not-so-good sponsor end up taking this bus to Sasebo for the most part. Lucky for the new guy, Mel's nice. 2) Take the city bus. It leaves much more regularly and stops at the airport. Easy to do if you've been here awhile. MWR will set you up with reservations, then you just go to the station, present your ID, and pay. This is a good way to go for vacationing puproses, but it puts you on a schedule. 3) Take the train. This works essentially the same way as taking the bus. 4) Take the backroads. It's slow, and easy to get lost, but only costs you gas money and then you have a car. 5) Take the expressway. This means paying tolls. The tolls to Fukuoka and back, I'm told, cost about 80 bucks.
Mel's nice, but she's not spend-80-bucks-to-get-some-guy-from-the-airport nice. So we used a secret method. She rented a car. The car rental costs 45 bucks, but it comes with a nice stack of toll tickets. Instead of paying, you give the guy at the window a ticket (or drop it in a box for that purpose) and you get through. Therefore, when the Navy folks want to go to Fukuoka, they often just rent a car and go that way. It's cheaper. This method also has the advantage that if you get lost, you're not paying extra to turn around.
So Thursday afternoon, I came home from my last day (hopefully ever) as a 3rd/4th grade teacher, spent an hour on school work, then jumped in the car with Mel. We left early because we decided to go to Hard Rock while we were in Fukuoka. It would make the trip more fun. I had forgotten how loud Hard Rock was, and how much food is on the average plate there, but we enjoyed it. We arrived at the airport without incident, too, which is a minor success. The new guy's flight was delayed, so we then spent an hour walking off dinner because we had both eaten too much. We felt much better by the time he arrived.
With a new passenger and bags stowed safely away, we got back in the car to go to Sasebo... and got lost.
The problem here, for the record is not that the signs aren't in English. Most signs have some romanji on them, if only the city names. There are two things that make it easy to get lost around here:
1) Unless it is a major highway, none of the roads have names. This is not such a big deal if you're Japanese, because you can read everything which means that everything is a landmark. If you can't read it, though, your set of landmarks is reduced greatly. Therefore, for example, the directions to the airport tell you to follow the signs in (easy enough), and then just go straight down the road you came in on to get back to the highway. We did that, but we ended up on the highway in the wrong direction.
2) There is nothing on the highway signs to indicate north, south, east, or west. Instead, the roads are going "to Saga" or "to Imari" or to whatever city happens to be nearest in that direction. If you don't know which cities are in which directions (and you can't read the kanji on the map you bought to determine which are which way), you just have to remember which landmarks you saw on the way in, and if you don't see them, you need to turn around. Except turning around means getting off the highway and hoping there's an on ramp in the other direction. This is not always the case.
Thankfully, Mel and I knew immediately we were going the wrong way. The entrace we used didn't offer more than one option, so we went up an exit, and were able to successfully turn around on the first try. So that was a relief. After that first issue, we made it home with no further problems.
The new CHENG (cheif engineer), by the way, seems like a pretty nice guy. His wife will be following in a few weeks. It is his job to have a house for her and their cats by the time she arrives. They lived in Japan once before he joined up, but on a small island, and they weren't able to do much sight seeing, so he says she'll be up for wandering around with me, which makes me pretty happy. I'm going to miss having Mel around, though.
In other news, Zack's e-mails are pleasant again. He's making all kinds of connections at his current port call, apparently. Sounds like it will be good for his career, so that's always a plus. Also, when someone says, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity," it's true. I hadn't realized it until this week. It hasn't been crazy hot, but it's been humid, and let me tell you, it's not especially comfortable. I'm told the rainy season is right around the corner. Should be interesting...