Taking the long way home from Japan to Frome, UK

Month: February 2016

New logo!!

Today we switched on our new logo!

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This amazing piece of artwork was made for us by our very kind friend, Jamie. Not only does it look spot on but, amazingly, Jamie’s managed to slim me down by about 15kg.

Thank you Jamie-san!

Road Trip (nearly) to Hiroshima

So, as usual, that early morning set-off didn’t happen until 1.30pm! A combination of coffee and croissants and finding out the roof rack had arrived delayed ‘kick off.’ Nevertheless, good to get the roof rack on – though we both think it slightly distracts from her drop-dead good looks. We also replaced the two dampers that hold the tailgate up as the old ones had lost their oomph.

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Sleeping Platform Part 4

Having bored people rigid with Parts 1, 2 and 3, I’m feeling slightly loathed to write a part 4. However, the job is now largely complete so, in the interests of closure, here’s the last instalment. I’m going to keep it short, though….

Having bought more wood, I spent my bank holiday Thursday making the second drawer, this time adding 2 dividers in to the mix.

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The maiden voyage

Amazingly, about four and half months have passed now since Clare and I decided that we’d take the long way home. In that time, we’ve spent 3 months waiting for our car to be ready, 2 weeks on holiday in the UK and most recently a month finally getting down to the job of getting Totty ready for action. Whilst Totty’s still far from being finished, she’s reached a stage now where we can sleep inside her, and on that basis we set off from Tokyo last weekend and hit the road for the weekend….

To be fair, “hitting the road” kind of overstates things. Actually we had a bit of lie-in, pottered around for an hour, got some food ready and sorted out a couple of jobs to make the camping more comfortable. And at that point… we hit the road.

Having talked about a few destinations, we’d settled on the Boso Peninsular the night before setting off. Whilst neither of us really knew quite what to expect there were a few points that drove our decision – we’d get to stop at Umihotaru service station; we’d see the sea; and it would likely be not busy, making our first attempt at “urban camping” a little less stressful.

I’m not quite sure what I was expecting from the ‘Tokyo Aqua Line,’ but it turns out that what I got was a 7km-long tunnel that emerges in the middle of Tokyo Bay and continues to the other side of the bay as a bridge. What was slightly surreal was that a rest stop has been constructed at the point where the road turns from a tunnel into a bridge in the middle of nowhere. The developers have managed to build something that looks something like a cross between a ship and an airport.  Good to finally get to see the sea though!

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Sleeping Platform Part 3

The saga continues! Catch up on pt 1 here and pt 2 here.

After one and a half weekends-worth of prepping, measuring and cutting, it was good this weekend to finally start putting the sleeping platform together. First task of the day, though, was to cut a couple of access holes for storage spaces that will only be accessible from the top. In several people’s designs on the ‘net, they add fancy hinged doors or removable panels but I’ve just left the holes open assuming our mattress won’t sink into them. I also cut a couple of slots into the top platform that we’ll use for the drawers to lock into.

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